During Spring 2007, WWU’s President Morse signed a letter of intent for the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, which is an effort to address global warming by garnering institutional commitments to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions, and to accelerate the research and educational efforts of higher education to equip society to re-stabilize the Earth’s climate. Implementation of the Presidents Climate Commitment at Western will rely on campus-wide collaboration and will be coordinated by the WWU Office of Sustainability.

The Presidents Climate Commitment is based on the premise that institutions of higher education are in a unique position that allows them to simultaneously have a large impact on local greenhouse gas emissions by reducing their own sizeable share and to educate a large number of people on the issues surrounding global climate change. The Commitment acknowledges the problems posed by anthropogenic global climate change and presents three steps that signatory institutions must commit to in the pursuit of climate neutrality. The first step mandates the creation of a comprehensive plan to achieve climate neutrality and sets out benchmarks for specific accomplishments at two months, one year, and two years. The second step provides a list of specific actions that can be taken to promote climate neutrality and at least two must be implemented by the signatory institution during the development of the climate action plan. One of the actions on the list mandates that “within one year of signing this document, [the University must] begin purchasing or producing at least 15% of [the] institution’s electricity consumption from renewable sources.” Two years before the President signed the Climate Commitment, Western began purchasing all of its energy from renewable sources. The final step requires that the university makes “the action plan, inventory, and periodic progress reports publicly available by providing them to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) for posting and dissemination.”

(source: http://www.presidentsclimatecommitment.org/html/commitment.php)