University of New Hampshire
EN-11: Inter-Campus Collaboration

AASHE Billion Dollar Green Challenge Second Nature Climate Commitment INFAS

Food Solutions New England - http://www.foodsolutionsne.org/ New England Municipal Sustainability Network NH Food Alliance - http://www.nhfoodalliance.com/ Northeast Campus Sustainability Consortium - https://necsc.wordpress.com/about-the-necsc/ New England Sustainability Consortium - http://www.newenglandsustainabilityconsortium.org/ Regional Association for Research on the Gulf of Maine - http://www.rargom.org Great Bay Real Time Environmental Monitoring Network- http://www.greatbaydata.org/ The Stewardship Network of New England - http://newengland.stewardshipnetwork.org/

- Smart and Sustainable Campuses 2017 - presentations on renewable energy trends and the "State of Sustainability 2016" report: https://sustainableunh.unh.edu/blog/2017/02/state-sustainability-higher-education-2016-life-cycle-higher-education-facilities - AASHE 2016: multiple presentations from UNH staff, faculty and sustainability Fellows, including Tom Kelly, Allison Leach, Jennifer Andrews and Brendan Hellebusch - CHESC 2016: presentation by Jennifer Andrews on CarbonMAP - 10th International conference on Life Cycle Assessment of Food. 19-21 Oct, Dublin, Ireland. “Land use efficiency of beef systems in the Northeastern USA from a food supply perspective.” Tichenor NE, van Zanten HHE, de Boer IJM, Peters CJ, McCarthy AC, Griffin T (2016).

UNH submitted a summary of its recent sustainability leadership efforts for a 2017 Sustainability Award from AASHE, as well as a description of the Nitrogen Footprint Network’s efforts to develop a campus nitrogen footprinting methodology. In addition, UNH’s Allison Leach worked with colleague Izzy Castner from the University of Virginia to guest-edit an edition of Sustainability, The Journal of Record which featured a couple of multi-campus case studies co-authored by UNH researchers: see “The Nitrogen Footprint Tool Network: A Multi-Institution Program To Reduce Nitrogen Pollution” (Castner et al) and “An Integrated Tool for Calculating and Reducing Institution Carbon and Nitrogen Footprints” (Barnes et al) at http://online.liebertpub.com/toc/sus/10/2.

There are numerous examples of staff and faculty engagement from across the university on boards, committees, networks, and conferences during the past three years. Here are a few: • Dr. Tom Kelly serves on the design team for the Inter-institutional Network for Food, Agriculture and Sustainability (INFAS). INFAS is a national network of university and college educators, researchers, and activists, representing 25 institutions and spanning 20 states, who collaborate in analysis, synthesis, and problem-solving with practitioners to increase U.S. food-system resilience; to illuminate critical trends and common stewardship of public goods essential for food systems, such as water, biodiversity, ecosystem services, and public institutions; and to reduce inequity and vulnerability in the U.S. food system. For more, see http://asi.ucdavis.edu/networks/infas • Stacey Purslow served on the Farm to Institution New England (FINE) Summit planning committee. The Summit brought together nearly 500 food and dining service professionals from colleges, schools and health care institutions focused on mobilizing the power of institutions as big buyers, community anchors, and cultural leaders for more sustainable food systems. See https://www.farmtoinstitution.org/blog/new-england-farm-institution-summit • Jennifer Andrews chairs the board of the Post-Landfill Action Network (PLAN)--an organization devoted to building student leadership and creating zero-waste college campuses as a stepping stone to a zero-waste future. See http://www.postlandfill.org/ • Stacey Purslow serves on the Northeast Organic Farming Association board • Elizabeth Farrell and Dr. Tom Kelly serve on the Food Solutions New England Process Team • Benjamin Hill serves on the New Hampshire Food Alliance Process Team • Elizabeth Farrell serves on the Health Care Without Harm, Faces of New England project task force

UNH has ongoing mentorship relationships with many of the individuals who rely on our free Campus Carbon Calculator™ and CarbonMAP tools, to help them to complete their greenhouse gas inventories. We invest in making sure that our staff maintains expertise in international carbon accounting practices and protocols, for the public and private sectors, in order to be able to offer this guidance to our colleagues and peers through “how-to guides” and reports, webinars, one-on-one support via phone and virtual conferencing. As one example, we have a project in place currently to support three Boston-area campuses (Boston University, Harvard and MIT) in efforts to refine their data collection methodologies, emission factors, and life-cycle accounting methodologies, to improve their Scope 3 emissions reporting for their next round of published inventories. This involves regular phone calls, working group sessions and in-person meetings with representatives from each of the three campuses, in which we provide them resources based on our work with, and synthesis of the available materials from, organizations like WRI that provide carbon accounting protocols and methodologies, or the EPA's Center for Life-Cycle Excellence that offer technical methodologies and applicable emissions factors; give feedback on their progress in collecting and analyzing Scope 3 activity data, from travel to purchasing to investment information; and offer suggestions for moving forward for each individual campus. What we learn from this project, we then share with other campuses using our carbon calculation tools as well.

As part of our participation in the cohort of colleges and universities that are working on the Nitrogen Footprint project, we review data from and advise our peer schools in that network about how to better measure and manage their nitrogen footprints.

We have convened a group of other universities and nonprofits and to discuss, analyze and plan for improving the quality and utilization of campus sustainability metrics. This group, which includes AASHE, Second Nature, NACUBO and APPA, USGBC and SEI; the University of Virginia, MIT and Northwestern; and the EPA Energy Star and DOE Better Buildings program staff. The group meets quarterly and is conducting an analysis of current practices and tools for collecting campus sustainability metrics, with the goal of developing recommendations for improving the system for higher ed as a whole and advancing sustainability goals across the sector.