Mission and History
Established in 2005, the Office of Sustainability works to promote the tenets of sustainability at Yale, in New Haven, and around the global higher-education community. By facilitating the development and implementation of best practices and encouraging innovative collaboration, teaching, and scholarship on sustainable themes, we seek to position Yale at the vanguard of the field and help it make the environmental, social, health, and economic benefits of sustainability a reality on its campus and around the world.
Mission
To advance sustainability by fostering innovation, helping to streamline operations, and preparing tomorrow's sustainability leaders.
Charge
To position Yale as a national and international model and leader in institutional sustainability - through education, outreach, research, and partnership.
Approach
The Yale Office of Sustainability strives to meet its charge and mission through five organizing principles: Policy and Governance; Systems and Operations; Campus Engagement; Academic Integration; and Strategic Partnerships. These principles give us a cohesive, thorough strategy for the 21st century’s most important issue. For more on our organizing principles, read about our strategy.
Sustainability at Yale: A History
The founding of the Office of Sustainability in 2005 is only an inflection point in the rich timeline of Yale’s engagement with sustainability to date. Yale’s intimate engagement with the environment started in 1900 with the founding of the School of Forestry, America’s first such institution, and has since evolved into an institution-wide movement that incorporates building construction; waste management; energy production; research; classroom instruction; local, national, and international collaboration; and much more. With the establishment of our office came the unification and augmentation of existing sustainable endeavors. Since then Yale has clarified its institutional vision for sustainability and codified its commitment to realizing that vision. Following is a timeline of notable events in the history of sustainability at Yale.
1900: Gifford Pinchot (Yale College 1889) and Henry S. Graves (Yale College 1892), respectively the first and second chiefs of the U.S. Forest Service, establish the Yale School of Forestry, the first forestry school in America.
1909: Aldo Leopold, a pioneering ecologist, conservationist, and environmental activist, graduates from the School of Forestry.
1970: On the inaugural Earth Day, an undergraduate begins a grassroots effort to collect and recycle paper around campus.
1972: Acknowledging the growing influence of environmental scholarship and teaching on the school’s mission, the School of Forestry adds “& Environmental Studies” to its name.
1972: Yale economists William Nordhaus and James Tobin are the first to comprehensively incorporate the costs of environmental degradation into an economic model.
1980: Yale Recycling becomes an official undergraduate organization and works closely with the Yale Office of Energy and Conservation.
1988: Yale Recycling becomes a full-time operation of the Facilities Department. Shortly thereafter, it hires a full-time director.
1994: The Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy is founded jointly by the Yale Law School and the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, providing a model for interdisciplinary academic collaboration on environmental topics. The years that follow see the establishment of the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale, the Center for Green Chemistry & Engineering, the Yale Project on Climate Change, a host of green-focused joint degree programs, and extensive interdepartmental cooperation.
1995: The Yale Student Environmental Coalition, with support from the Heinz Family Foundation, hosts the Campus Earth Summit, an international student environmental conference with over 5000 students and administrators from institutions in all fifty states, twenty-four countries, and six continents. Summit attendees draft The Blueprint for a Green Campus, a comprehensive plan for making college campuses a model of environmental behavior.
1998: Environmental issues receive heightened attention on campus when a group of undergraduate students produce the Yale Green Plan and submit its findings and recommendations to Yale College administrators.
2001: The Office of the Provost establishes the Advisory Committee on Environmental Management (ACEM) and appoints faculty, staff and students as members.
2002: ACEM proposes a set of Environmental Principles and presents them to the President and Officers of the University, who approve them. This constitutes Yale’s first formal commitment to broad-based institutional sustainability.
2004: ACEM proposes eight environmental targets to the Office of the Provost, seven of which are endorsed.
2004: Julie Newman, current Director of the Office of Sustainability, becomes Sustainability Director, the first administrator dedicated to furthering Yale’s sustainable efforts full-time.
2005: The Yale Office of Sustainability is created with Newman as its director. It has since grown to include five fulltime-equivalent employees and 20 undergraduate and graduate research assistants.
2005: Work finishes on the Chemistry Research Building, Yale’s first building constructed to sustainable LEED standards. The building ultimately achieves a LEED Silver rating. That year also sees the completion of the Sterling Hall of Medicine C3 Laboratory, the first ever LEED-certified lab. All new campus construction now conforms to sustainable building standards.
2005: President Levin commits Yale to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 43 percent by 2020, despite an estimated 15 percent growth during that period.
2006: Yale becomes an inaugural member of the International Alliance of Research Universities, a group of 10 institutions that exchange ideas and practices on a range of topics, including sustainability. Yale’s other sustainability partners include members of Ivy Plus Sustainability Group and the Northeast Campus Sustainability Consortium.
2008: Yale President Richard C. Levin gives a landmark speech on climate change at the University of Copenhagen.
2010:President Richard C. Levin announces Yale's Sustainability Strategic Plan 2010-2013 developed by the Sustainability Task Force that deliberately focuses on campus systems, administrative systems, earth systems, education and engagement in an effort to strengthen the foundation of the University's sustainability commitment.