Barnard College
PRE-2: Points of Distinction

In October and November 2020, the Office of Campus Sustainability and Climate Action, in collaboration with the Student Government’s Committee on Sustainability, organized a series of three Campus Conversations. These discussions, attended by over 100 individuals, including students, faculty, and staff from diverse departments, aimed to refine the objectives outlined in Barnard’s Climate Action Vision.

Each conversation focused on a specific topic including Emissions from Air Travel, Sustainability and Access, and Integrating Climate into the Curriculum. Participants were provided with a comprehensive document beforehand, outlining the questions for the community, scientific basics, Barnard’s history on the topic, and approaches adopted by other institutions. The sessions began by ensuring participants had a clear understanding of this document, followed by in-depth presentations involving voices from across the campus.

Crucially, these discussions involved a groundbreaking approach: a Citizens’ Assembly, comprising 16 members representing students, faculty, and staff. This assembly, a first of its kind in the United States, to the best of our knowledge, included individuals who attended all three conversations and five additional assembly-only sessions for deliberation. These members, chosen as a representative sample of the community, engaged in a consensus-building process facilitated by an independent moderator, Dallase Scott. The assembly was tasked with generating recommendations based on their reflections and the community conversations they witnessed.

The Office of Campus Sustainability and Climate Action has since used this guiding document to help shape our planning and priorities.

This initiative marked a significant milestone, emphasizing the importance of inclusive and democratic decision-making processes in addressing climate issues at educational institutions.

During the 2021-2022 academic year, in collaboration with Energy Strategies, we developed a comprehensive Scope 3 tool consisting of three main sections:

1. The Calculator:
This component serves as a complete screening-level inventory encompassing all relevant and mandatory categories as defined by the GHG Protocol. To ensure accurate representation of an academic year, we chose 2019 as our reference, the last "regular year" prior to the pandemic. Each ledger account was meticulously assigned to one of the 15 upstream and downstream categories and subcategories. We utilized the most appropriate emission factors, drawing from the 2016 EPA EEIO detailed commodity, summary commodity, and summary industry data, along with other select resources adjusted for inflation.

2. Stakeholder Engagement Criteria Ranking Worksheet:
Designed to prioritize scope 3 reduction actions through stakeholder engagement, this worksheet involved key departments and committees such as Budget and Finance, Purchasing, the Climate Action Committee, and Campus Operations. Here's how the tool operated:

-Stakeholders were provided with essential information about our work
and were briefed on our scope 3 findings up to that point.
-Stakeholders were then invited to weigh the importance (%) of each
focus criteria category. These categories encompassed:
-volume of GHG emissions
-our capacity to influence and drive changer
-risk exposure
-stakeholder focus
-peer actions
-anticipated co-benefits,
-GHG emissions per dollar spent.
-Barnard's scope 3 emissions were meticulously categorized into 32
components, each quantified in tCO2e and expressed as a percentage of
Barnard's total scope 3 emissions. Participants were then tasked with
ranking the seven focus areas for each of these 32 categories on a
scale of 1 to 4.

3. Scope 3 Emissions Focus Activity Ranking:
This section provides a visual representation of focus activities, ranked from highest to lowest as determined by the criteria worksheet. Additionally, it tracks the cumulative reduction necessary to address two-thirds of our total scope 3 emissions, aligning with the minimum guidance provided by the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi).