Rethinking Carbon Neutrality in Higher Education - Opinion piece by Prof. Alex Barron, Lucy Metz '22, and Aaron Strong

Assistant Professor Alex Barron, student Lucy Metz '22, and Aaron Strong published an opinion piece in Inside HigherEd based on their research into how university carbon neutrality commitments are working in practice.  They studied 11 American higher education institutions that have already announced achieving carbon neutrality based on an action framework developed in the early 2000s to help businesses take early climate action.  They found that while it is a potentially useful milestone, we cannot view carbon neutrality as the end goal if we want to respond effectively to the climate crisis. We need to be both more thoughtful and more aggressive in our climate actions.