In 2018, the college began to quantify our carbon footprint by applying the University Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) inventory protocol to college-scale data. The following table and text describe five years of inventory results indicating that we are responsible for ~10K mt CO2e/year over that time span.
The protocol does not account for most Scope III emissions, likely associated primarily with purchasing, suggesting that we are probably responsible for an additional ~40%, or 4000 mt, based on cursory University estimates. Also, all electricity and heating (~80-85% of our footprint) related decision making and purchasing are done at the University administration level, thus as a college we are limited in what we can accomplish with respect to decreasing our carbon footprint to changing our behavior and use of those utilities and advocating for change at the University level. The following table aggregates relevant data from the inventory and is followed by pie chart presentations (in the accordions) of the inventory results for each of the five years studied.
