Sustainability Sustainability Reports

Amherst College formed the Office of Environmental Sustainability (OES) in October 2014 with a vision to “fulfill the College’s moral obligation to incorporate environmental awareness and practices into the daily lives of students, so they will be equipped to shape the environment they live in through their actions and leadership.” Today, the OES is a focal point and catalyst for awareness-building, collaboration and action on sustainability issues across campus.

To keep the campus informed of our work, we have created a series of Sustainability Reports that outline key initiatives and areas of focus.

Climate change is a defining issue of our time. Over the past decade, we have taken significant steps to reduce our campus’ greenhouse gas emissions, including switching to lower carbon fuel sources, adding a co-generation plant to create heat and electricity from those fuel sources more efficiently, designing and constructing buildings following a high performance building standard, and completing recommissioning and deep energy retrofits of existing buildings to further improve our campus energy intensity. These actions have resulted in a 30 percent reduction in emissions from 2006 levels. However, we know that to drive even stronger action and further reduce our emissions, we needed to set quantitative greenhouse gas reduction targets and consistently report on our progress.

Read the December 2015 Report