Climate Action Plan
WildCAP - UNH's Climate Action Plan (CAP)
The University of New Hampshire has had a long-standing commitment to leadership in sustainability, energy efficiency, and transportation demand management. This Climate Action Plan (CAP) consolidates the work and planning that has long been underway across the campus into a coherent framework for strengthening and expanding those efforts over the next quarter-century. With those long-term goals in mind, this plan focuses on planning for the next 10 years, so as to integrate with existing long-range planning activities at the university, such as the Campus Master Plan and others.
At the heart of the plan are a series of targets for reducing overall campus greenhouse gas emissions, and a series of recommended actions––university-wide policies as well as specific projects––which will allow the university to meet these targets.
The university has adopted a strategy of implementing change, either in the way campus activity is conducted or in the built environment, to achieve greenhouse gas reductions. We challenge ourselves by taking this more difficult path than the alternative of purchased credits which allow business as usual to persist.
This plan is the result of a two-year process coordinated by the UNH Energy Task Force (ETF). In response to the signing the the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) in 2007, the ETF was charged with responding to the requirements of the commitment of which this plan is the most significant.
WildCAP Highlights
- UNH’s Climate Action Plan (CAP) is named WildCAP, after the university’s wild cat mascot.
- The plan is the culmination of more than 30 years of energy efficiency efforts at UNH and 10 years of activity by the University Office of Sustainability’s Climate Education Initiative (CEI) including the creation of a campus-wide Energy Task Force (ETF) in 2006.
- The plan calls for greenhouse gas reductions of 50% by 2020 and 80% by 2050 (measured against a 1990 baseline).
- UNH will receive up to 85% of the energy used by the campus from the EcoLine™ project, a landfill gas-to-energy project that uses methane gas from a nearby landfill. UNH is the first campus in the country to use landfill gas as its primary fuel source. In partnership with Waste Management of New Hampshire, Inc., UNH launched EcoLine to pipe enriched and purified gas from Waste Management’s landfill in Rochester to the Durham campus. UNH will sell the renewable energy certificates (RECs) generated by using landfill gas through 2015 to help finance the overall cost of the project and to invest in additional energy efficiency projects on campus. EcoLine is projected to cut more than 36,000 t CO2e (metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent) annually by 2020.
- The ETF (the authors of the plan) have recommended more than 25 projects – including a vehicle fleet management program and improved energy management of campus computers – for adoption by UNH. These projects would reduce an additional 7,500 t CO2e annually beyond the EcoLine reductions by 2020.
- In addition, more than 15 university-wide policies – including a review of the university's telecommuting, travel, and procurement policies – have been recommended for adoption which would strengthen the projects and lead to further reductions.
- Many of the projects in the CAP will be financed though the creation of an innovative energy efficiency revolving fund. This fund will be created with seed money from a ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) grant and supplemented with funds generated though the sale of RECs from the Ecoline project through 2015 as well as future fundraising efforts. The fund will capture the cost savings of efficiency projects on campus to reinvest in future projects.
- WildCAP will be a key operational component of the new UNH Sustainability Academy. The UNH Sustainability Academy is a university-wide initiative to significantly increase the impact of UNH’s curricular, operations, research, and engagement programming in sustainability. The Academy will build upon UNH’s strengths across the sciences, humanities and campus practices to offer a range of integrated educational, research and engagement experiences that respond to the challenges and opportunities of sustainability.
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