Higher Education
Support campus sustainability by making study abroad, conferences, and sports events carbon conscious.
Higher education plays a major role in responding to climate change. Many colleges and universities have already reduced emissions by large percentages and are educating new generations of aware and engaged citizens. Schools are also finding it difficult to account for unavoidable emissions such as study abroad travel, employee commuting, athletics travel, and faculty and staff travel.
Earth Deeds helps schools understand and account for their unavoidable emissions in meaningful ways. Rather than buy offsets, which have little transparency or educational value, we enable schools to onset emissions and support campus or community-based solutions to global warming. Here’s how it works:
Create a “Team”: A Team is a group of any size that is connected through a common event or activity. Examples include individual classes, study abroad programs, student or staff commuting, sports team travel, and large gatherings or conferences.
Choose a Project: We can help you identify campus or community-based initiatives that have meaning to your school (e.g. energy retrofits, new courses, farm-to-school programs). Initiatives are not limited to ones mitigating CO2 and we have a database of over 100,000 projects if you need help in finding one.
Measure Emissions: We provide you with custom calculators, pedagogical materials, and reports that can engage your students, faculty, and staff in measuring, understanding, and tracking emissions from individual or group travel. We’re happy to offer technical support and consulting as needed.
Contribute Funds: Individuals contribute online to account for their unavoidable emissions based on the social cost of carbon, which is the best scientific estimate of the actual costs of emitting greenhouse gases. We also provide crowdfunding tools to help solicit additional funding if desired.
Support the Project: We transfer collected funds to the projects you choose. Earth Deeds retains a 15% fulfillment fee to enhance our capacity to combat climate change and help other organizations become carbon conscious.
Celebrate: We offer social media tools to promote your efforts and the project you are supporting. We also can provide a Carbon Conscious ecolabel you can display on your website and materials.
Example #1 A Sustainable Living class at UMass Amherst accounted for their class’ CO2 emissions and then contributed and raised funds to support their campus Eco-Rep student program.
Example #2 Pacific Lutheran University onset the emissions for their students studying abroad and set up a student committee to choose projects to support. The first year, they will fund retrofits of a campus building and in future years will support projects in students’ host communities.