Zoe Berg, Photo Editor

Yale is on track to achieve 89 percent of the goals laid out in its 2025 Sustainability Plan — a plan that has been touted as building a more sustainable future but which some community members say is not ambitious enough.

At the close of the year, the University released the Yale Sustainability 2021 Progress Report to track its progress towards Yale’s 2025 Sustainability Plan. The report weighs the University’s progress toward 38 goals. Fifty-seven percent have been met, while Yale is falling behind on two. The plan is set and monitored by University officials, and several professors and students raised concerns that the goals fall short of addressing the scale of the climate change threat.

“Yale has effectively infinite resources, and they could throw a lot more behind this effort today than they have already,” said Yale School of Environment professor Gaboury Benoit ’76.  

In 2016, the University launched its Sustainability Plan, which intends to modify Yale’s research, teaching, management of assets and carbon emission levels in order to address climate change. Yale has adopted a three-pronged approach — making campus buildings more energy efficient, increasing the use of renewable energy and investing in carbon offsets — to become carbon neutral by 2035 and reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. 

Yale’s waste diversion goal, which looked to “divert 60 percent of materials, while maintaining or reducing the overall volume of waste” by 2024, is currently behind schedule. The University is also not on track to meet its green cleaning goal to make over 40 percent of chemicals used green or green- certified.

According to the progress report, Yale diverted 26 percent of its waste in 2021 and decreased overall material usage from pre-pandemic usage by 34 percent. The University was unable to provide data on its green cleaning goal because of the pandemic, the report said.

“Progress towards these goals was heavily impacted by the pandemic,” said Lisa Noriega, sustainability data analyst at the Yale Office of Sustainability. 

Katie Schlick ’22, the former president of the Student Environmental Coalition and Silliman sustainability liaison, told the News that she is generally optimistic about the plan. While she said she appreciates that the plan does not limit its focus to just carbon emissions, instead addressing a variety of environmental issues on campus, Schlick was critical of the University’s carbon neutrality timeline. 

“I really don’t understand why they’re doing 2035 instead of 2030,” Schlick said. “It just doesn’t align with science.”

Guidelines set by the Paris Agreement dictate that countries aim to transition to clean energy by 2030.

Benoit was also skeptical of the Sustainability Plan’s commuting goal, which is to increase commutes to campus using sustainable transportation by 10 percent from 2015 to 2025. 

“With the impending doom that climate change suggests, we should be thinking about changing things by factors of two, going 50 percent,” Benoit says. “10 percent. It just seems very, very incremental. And they feel they’re on track. You know, it’s like really?”

According to the progress report, over half of the 38 goals have already been met, and another third are on track to be completed on schedule. The report also revealed that Yale updated and expanded upon some of its original goals.

“More than halfway through the nine-year timeline, we have achieved 22 of the 38 original goals, are on track to achieve 12 more and have announced two new goals to reflect changing context and priorities,” said Noriega.

Stormwater and water management is marked as an “achieved goal” in the progress report. But Benoit questioned the extent to which the University had met the standard it set in the report.

“The plan makes sense. And if they were aggressive about it, it would lead to good outcomes,” he said of the stormwater and water management goals. “But they’re not being aggressive about it… The goals are ambitious enough, but if you don’t implement them, the outcome is not going to be substantial.”

Benoit said that part of the problem with the University’s stormwater management sustainability methods is the focus on new projects instead of retrofitting old buildings. 

Sena Sugiono ’25, an energy liaison with the Office of Sustainability, agreed that older buildings on campus will have to be renovated to meet efficiency standards, but has observed substantial logistical difficulties relocating people and equipment when renovating older buildings, especially when lab equipment has to be moved. 

“People in lab spaces are hard to move around the technical equipment,” Sugiono said. “It’s hard to move around. And so I think they’ve done considerable work when it comes to making changes with regards to moving people and labs.”

Jonathan Gewirtzman ENV ’26, a graduate student representative on the Sustainability Advisory Council, praised the fluid and long-term approach that Yale has adopted in sustainability planning. 

“It is nice to see the University thinking in the long term,” Gewirtzman said. “Thinking about how sustainability is going to mean more than reducing our own carbon footprint on campus, but also thinking critically about how … Is New Haven going to be affected by rising sea levels and extreme weather? And how can the University work with the city in order to try to mitigate some of those challenges?”

Schlick, however, said that more could be done to consider New Haven in the University’s Sustainability efforts. She emphasized the need for further discussions around how the city and University could work in concert to benefit residents.

“We’re located in New Haven,” Schlick said. “So what does that mean for all of the New Haven residents? So they also benefit from that energy usage? I don’t know, and I don’t think that there’s many conversations that are made visible around that.”

In the future, Gewirtzman hopes there is more collaboration between the University and its students. When the Sustainability Advisory Council, which is “tasked with offering guidance and inspiration on Yale’s Sustainability Plan,” was presented with the progress report, “there was no debate or discussion,” Gewirtzman said.

Shlick added that the University should be investing more resources into campus education, especially as a way to reduce energy and campus emissions. She suggested that new students receive sustainability orientation. 

“At the end of the day, we have 6,000 undergrads. We have tons more grad students. We have faculty members and staff. And we have everyone else who works for the University,” Shlick said. “And we have to implicate everyone in this challenge. And we need to give people the tools and the resources and the education in order to be able to contribute to this.”

A campus-wide sustainability survey conducted in October 2021 will also be used to measure Yale’s progress in meeting its sustainability goals. The results of the survey will be published on Feb. 8.