California is home to the three largest public university systems in the nation, with 148 campuses across the state serving nearly 3 million students annually. Maintaining expansive systems comes at a large cost, both in dollars and greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.
Every time a student flips on the light switch in their dorm, a professor turns on the computer to start a lecture, or a facilities employee drives across campus to make a repair, a campus’ carbon footprint grows. Now, as the state asks colleges to meet mandatory emissions reductions by 2045 while also accommodating more students, the University of California, California State University, and community colleges will have to figure out how to reduce emissions while growing in size and scope.
The University of California set the pace for campus sustainability when, in 2013, it became the first major university system to commit to carbon neutrality by 2025. Then, a year out from its original deadline, the UC changed course.
Last July, the 10-campus UC system published its revised plan to “fully decarbonize” by 2045, reversing its original plan, which relied on carbon offsets to cut the majority of its emissions. The new plan outlines cutting emissions by at least 90% from 2019 levels by using energy from renewable sources and cutting the last 10% with projects that remove emissions from the atmosphere. The system will spend $6 billion to $10 billion to achieve those emissions reductions, according to Colin Mickle, the UC Office of the President’s associate director for renewable energy.
The new plan comes at a time when all three of the state’s higher education systems are setting or reworking climate goals in line with California’s statewide deadline to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045. California’s public colleges and universities are faced with decarbonizing their campuses rapidly — by directly reducing emissions — without sacrificing their institutional missions.
To power their operations, campuses buy outside electricity from local utilities or produce energy using on-site power plants. To directly reduce emissions campuses can retrofit fixtures to use less energy, electrify buildings and vehicle fleets and move away from fossil fuels to renewables like solar arrays, wind energy projects and geothermal plants.
Removing 100% of emissions is incredibly difficult, complex and costly for most schools. Many campuses have already tackled the high-return, low-risk projects like installing LED lighting that make a dent in emissions relatively quickly and without breaking the bank — meaning the tougher aspects of reducing emissions lie ahead.
While the UC will look to make progress on the second take of its action plan, the 23-campus California State University system is implementing plans to reduce and monitor emissions. The 115 physical campuses of the California Community Colleges are developing plans due by next year.
How much carbon do California’s colleges emit?
The UC was far from reaching carbon neutrality when it announced its new plan last year, emitting more than 800,000 metric tons of carbon emission in 2023. UCLA, the UC’s most energy-intensive campus, emits the carbon dioxide equivalent of nearly 50,000 cars annually.
The UC’s emissions are more than three times that of the Cal State system, which produced just under 267,000 metric tons of greenhouse gasses in 2022. Both the UC and Cal State are complex, expansive systems that include dormitories, academic buildings, hospitals, research laboratories, sports venues, and other properties that all contribute to their overall emissions.
The UC spans 149 million square feet across its 10 campuses, five medical centers, research centers, and other property. The Cal State system managed 74 million square feet across its 23 campuses, the Maritime Academy and other property as of 2022. Funding these operations are not cheap either, the state spent $23.5 billion of its general budget last year on higher education.
The California Community Colleges are in the earliest stage of their climate efforts. The system does not track carbon emissions, according to Melissa Villarin, a spokesperson for the Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. Identifying emissions amounts per campus and for the whole system is the first major step toward carbon neutrality, she said.
UC, others ditch carbon offsets
Restructuring entire campuses originally built for fossil fuel-driven life is a complex and costly task. The average cost to retrofit a building for increased energy efficiency is an estimated $118 per square foot, bringing the cost of “greening” an 80,000-square-foot campus building to nearly $9.5 million. Doing so while managing a host of other priorities presents a challenge for California’s sprawling university systems. Factors like location, student population and institutional mission can make the work of reducing emissions extremely complex, according to Lindsey Rowell, chief of Cal State’s Office of Energy, Sustainability & Transportation.
For some colleges, that’s where carbon offsets come in. Offsets work by paying to suck carbon emissions out of the atmosphere or to prevent the release of pollutants. To achieve carbon neutrality in a crunch, a college can buy offsets, which allows it to write off the metric tons of carbon emissions removed somewhere else. For example, to reach carbon neutrality in 2020, UC Merced bought offsets to prevent the release of methane gasses at landfills in Oklahoma, North Carolina, South Dakota and Nebraska.
“If you’re a big institution, the prices of offsets tend to be pretty inexpensive, far less expensive than actually investing in reducing your emissions,” said Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of economics at Yale. “It can be pretty tempting to go down the offset path.”
Offsets have become a back-pocket solution for colleges struggling to reduce the last of their emissions. Natural gas-fueled heating systems and air travel emissions tend to be the toughest for campuses to mitigate in their final stretch to carbon neutrality. UC Berkeley scholars, for example, travel more than 100 million miles a year.
Before pivoting its climate plan, the UC planned to offset 650,000 metric tons of emissions in 2025 to become net-zero — more than 80% of its current emissions levels. Buying that many offsets would have cost the UC between $4.5 million and $16 million, depending on offset market prices, according to Mickle.
Following lobbying from faculty and students, in 2018 the UC tasked researchers with developing a strategy to determine the offsets it should buy to achieve its 2025 goal. At the end of the three-year effort, the team found the vast majority of offsets “systematically and significantly” claimed to cut more emissions than they actually did. The findings led the UC to halt the large-scale purchase of offsets in 2022 and culminated in the new 2045 goal for carbon neutrality.
“The university system decided that it was too hard to procure offsets to the large quantity that we would need starting in 2025,” said Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project and a professor of climate change policy at UC Berkeley, who led the research. “We decided instead to take the money that we would have spent on procuring offsets and put it into supporting accelerated decarbonization on the campuses themselves.”
Rowell, who has led Cal State’s sustainability efforts since 2021, said offsets will only be considered once campuses get within a few percentage points of their goals. “To me, it is extremely important that the benefits of carbon reduction stay with the communities which are being impacted by carbon offsets — and, to an even more granular level, the benefits stay with the particularly disadvantaged and most at-risk communities in which many of our universities exist,” Rowell said.
Offsets are not currently part of the California Community Colleges’ climate approach either, according to Villarin, though plans are still being developed.
UC’s new plan was a welcome change for Adam Cooper, a Ph.D. candidate in atmospheric chemistry at UC San Diego and an organizer for the UC Green New Deal Coalition. The group campaigns for decreased reliance on carbon offsets, more ambitious decarbonization timelines and decommissioning natural gas powered plants.
“We wanted to focus on actual emissions reduction, taking full accounting of our impact on the climate, impact on people caused by the climate crisis, and reducing that as close to zero as possible,” Cooper said.
Systems solidifying plans to meet California’s 2045 goal
Decarbonization studies are currently underway at UC campuses, funded by $1 million grants to each campus, and will help determine emission reduction targets for campuses by January 2026. To support a transition away from fossil fuels, campuses are moving to expand renewable electricity supplies and improve energy efficiency.
But some campuses, like UC Santa Cruz, still generate most of their electricity through on-site natural gas power plants, which produce the bulk of most campuses’ emissions. Others, like UC San Diego, are powered and heated by co-generation plants, which produce electricity and heat using natural gas.
UC Santa Cruz published a plan in October 2023 to replace its current systems with equipment that will renewably generate electricity via solar and green hydrogen. The campus will move to phase out its power plant, which generates about two-thirds of the school’s emissions.
The California State system also is set on decarbonization. Its climate plan, first published in 2014 and revised in 2022, lays out the system’s goal to reduce carbon emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2040. The system aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045 in line with the statewide mandate, though campuses vary in their individual deadlines.
The system’s policy requires campuses to monitor and report their monthly energy use. It also includes a commitment not to invest in any natural gas infrastructure in campus projects starting in 2035.
The Cal State system has managed to balance growth with sustainability goals, Rowell said, adding over 9 million square feet while keeping energy usage levels relatively flat over the last 15 years. But now that the system has tackled most of the projects that on-site maintenance crews can handle, like installing LED lighting and changing HVAC systems to better regulate building temperature, other challenges lie ahead.
“We’re really good in the CSU at doing a lot with very little money and very little resources,” Rowell said. “We’re now butting up against large scale projects like central plant boiler replacements, overhauling infrastructure — things that are very disruptive to campus, which means they have short timelines, which means they’re expensive to do.”
Some Cal State campuses are chipping away at carbon emissions reductions by installing on-site solar projects, battery storage facilities and buying energy wholesale. Rowell suspects Cal State Dominguez Hills — which reduced emissions by 50% since 2019 using leftover monthly budgets to slowly retrofit its campus — will be the first campus to achieve carbon neutrality.
Dyami Ruiz-Martinez, a student at San Bernardino Valley College studying accounting, said it was important for him to play a part in developing the community college’s climate plan as a member of the Student Senate. He said his family in San Bernardino County is already facing extreme heat and issues with water and energy accessibility that will only be made worse with climate change.
The community college system’s climate plan aims to beat the statewide 2045 carbon neutrality goal by a decade, setting a 2035 deadline for 100% emissions elimination, with an intermediate goal of 75% reductions at the campus and district levels by 2030. Campuses have to set their own plans by 2025.
The district and campus-specific plans Ruiz-Martinez worked on rely on real estate development projects like new, energy-efficient buildings. District leadership hopes more sustainably designed buildings will help campuses inch toward carbon neutrality by 2035. But a lack of funding makes grand-scheme changes to campus operations challenging. Limited funding means that some campuses may have to “choose between funding for 2035” or funding to meet current student needs, Ruiz-Martinez said.
There currently aren’t any state funds dedicated to helping campuses decarbonize at the system level. Tight budgets are also affecting emission reduction progress at Cal States and making it difficult for campuses to work on deferred maintenance and infrastructure backlogs, Rowell said.
“Those campuses that are falling behind just don’t have the resources to keep up with trying to keep paint on the walls and the lights on … and continue to serve the students the best they can,” Rowell said.
Chkarboul is a fellow with the CalMatters College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.