Messe – Winter 2025

U of M’s Progress on Sustainability Initiatives

Josh Messe

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The University of Michigan hails its Campus Plan 2050 as “a blueprint for our future.”¹ The plan was first announced in late 2023, with detailed plans released in late 2024. The 25-year plan focuses on long-term investments to modernize academic facilities and transportation options on campus while purporting to focus on sustainability. 

The plan organizes itself around five general planning themes: education and campus life, increasing accessibility, improving outdoor spaces, sustainability changes with green energy in mind, and improvements to the transportation system.²

In his letter espousing the plan, President Santa J. Ono emphasizes that sustainability is “at [its] heart.”³ The University promises to prioritize environmentally responsible practices in its extensive construction plans, as well as providing some lofty emissions benchmarks for the campus to hit along the way.⁴ Michigan’s ability to achieve these lofty goals may prove more difficult than expected. 

Michigan’s Progress Report

Michigan set numerous goals for the Ann Arbor campus to reach in 2025, as well as longer-term emissions goals for all three campuses. It released fiscal year data showing year-on-year emissions changes and how it has fared concerning these emission reduction goals.⁵ Shana Weber, the Associate Vice President for Campus Sustainability, thinks that phrases like ‘carbon neutral’ and ‘emissions reductions’ are “insufficient for capturing the essence of this work.”⁶ She instead wants to go beyond just trying to “do the least harm” and instead become “climate positive.”⁷  This early in the initiative, when being ‘climate positive’ is a long way off seeing how much progress has been made can act as a valuable benchmark. Likewise, these progress reports can create accountability in the University system if it doesn’t adequately adhere to its goals. 

A. 2025 Goals and Progress Made

2025 Emissions reduction goals⁸

• Reduce emissions from purchased power to net zero (not achieved)
• Establish goals for a wide range of indirect emission sources (unclear if achieved)
• Reduce landscape chemical applications by 40% (achieved in 2019)*⁹
• Reduce carbon output per passenger trip by 30% (to date: 0%)*
• Reduce waste sent to landfill by 40% (reduction to date: 14%)*
• Purchase 20% of U-M food from local and sustainable sources (19% reduction by FY20, no new goal yet)*

B. Longer term goals

2040 Emissions Goals

• Eliminate direct, on-campus gas emissions 

2050 Emissions Goals

• Achieve a net-zero emissions endowment 

The emissions goal at the crux of the plan is to achieve on-campus carbon neutrality by 2040. Per University published data, Michigan reduced greenhouse gas emissions from direct on-campus sources and from purchased electricity by 34% since 2010.¹⁰  From 2023 to 2024, Michigan reduced its emissions from those same sources by 8%. Michigan also announced plans late last year to start installations of solar panels with a capacity of 25 Megawatts across all of its campuses, enough to power 3,000 homes annually.¹¹ Construction is planned to start during 2025.¹² 

Comparing the University’s Plan to California and Germany¹³

California and Germany have particularly robust decarbonization systems but differ significantly in their approaches to the problem. Both jurisdictions have overarching “economy-wide goals for substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” by 2050, the same end-date as the University’s plan.¹⁴ And both are leading world economies making serious efforts to make energy transition.¹⁵

Contrasting the key components of different plans can illuminate successful and popularly supported decarbonization strategies. Showing a variety of approaches can hopefully strengthen the idea that decarbonization plans can be enacted successfully in a variety of different scenarios with different voter bases and constraints and continue to grow the decarbonization “toolbox for policymakers, lawyers, and others.”¹⁶ 

Germany and California are much larger areas than the University of Michigan. This fact spells a need for a higher degree of political buy-in to enact large-scale environmental decarbonization plans. Naturally their solutions will be slightly different than a university, which operates on much smaller parcels of land and has more control of its energy intake and construction projects.

Germany and California have successfully set aggressive decarbonization goals and chose their legal pathways to those goals with public support in mind.¹⁷ California set a goal to reduce emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, and to reduce emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.¹⁸ Germany is even more ambitious, aiming to reduce limits to at least 55% below 1990 levels, by 2030, and to reduce emissions to 80%-95% below 1990 levels by 2050.¹⁹

California opted to proceed with a carbon cap-and-trade program. The program “caps overall greenhouse gas emissions and then reduces the overall emissions limit annually until the . . . goal is met.”²⁰ It combined the program with a long-term focus on energy efficiency in building codes and appliances. But even these measures are not enough to meet the state’s goals without either significantly reducing vehicle miles travelled or transitioning heavily to zero emission vehicles.²¹

Germany’s plan builds on the same structural basis as California’s plan. However, Germany’s main driver for increasing renewable energy is a “feed-in tariff.”²² This tariff requires grid operators to purchase renewable electricity at specific rates, plus an “adder” to allow operators to make a profit.²³ This tariff helped renewable sources grow from 6.2% in 2000 to 31% of the country’s electrical consumption in 2015.²⁴ Similar to California, Germany is also taking a variety of other measures to pursue its emissions goals, including increasing construction and electricity generation efficiency, vehicle efficiency standards and other further policy measures.²⁵

Ultimately, one single strategy will never be enough.²⁶ Comparing various programs and their successes can shed light on where Campus Plan 2050 might succeed, and where it might fall short. The University of Michigan is not burdened by many of the issues state and national governments face when it comes to environmental legislation. This means the University is unlikely to have the same problems with large-scale transportation reform and construction efficiency. But this early in the process, it is unclear how aggressively the University will try to meet its goals. 

Conclusion

Campus Plan 2050 is ambitious, and its early progress reports show critical buy-in and administrative support, despite falling short of some of its early goals. It draws inspiration from other successful decarbonization plans, while leveraging the University’s unique position as a climate actor. With an unfriendly administration to climate change in the white house, state and local climate change initiatives become even more important. And as time runs out to limit global temperature increase below 2°C, any new initiatives to curtail emissions can be crucial to convince other governments to recognize the importance of the crisis and follow suit.²⁷

1. Regents of the University of Michigan, Campus Plan 2050, https://campusplan2050.umich.edu/files/campusplan2050.pdf at *1 (Oct. 4, 2024). ↩︎
2. Campus Plan 2050 at *13. Check out the detailed campus plan 2050 planning document for more detail on these planning themes, and the proposed specific changes to the campus. The fourth planning theme primarily focuses on a clean energy transition, changing to geo-exchange and ground source heat pumps for heating and cooling as well as the integration of solar panels. ↩︎
3.  Id. at 4. ↩︎
4. Regents of the University of Michigan, Campus Plan 2050 Overview, https://campusplan2050.umich.edu/files/campusplan2050-overview.pdf at *4 (Oct. 4, 2024). ↩︎
5. See Planet Blue, Sustainability & Climate Action at the University of Michigan FY24 Report, https://planetblue.umich.edu/campus/uploads/FY24-Climate-Action-Annual-Report.pdf (last visited Feb. 23, 2025). ↩︎
6. Sustainability & Climate Action at the University of Michigan at *5. ↩︎
7. Id. at 5. ↩︎
8. Id. at 7. ↩︎
9. The goals with an asterisk were established in 2011 building off 2006 baselines and will be updated after FY25. The other goals have no clear establishment date. ↩︎
10. Id. ↩︎
11. Id. at 11. ↩︎
12. Adam Fisher, University proceeds with plan for campus solar power projects, The University Record, https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-proceeds-with-plan-for-campus-solar-power-projects/ (May 16, 2024). ↩︎
13. See generally John C. Dernbach, Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization: Lessons from California and Germany, 82 BROOK. L. REV. 825 (2017). ↩︎
14. Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization, 82 BROOK. L. REV. at 829. ↩︎
15. Id. ↩︎
16. Id. at 842.  See Plan 2030 Implementation Pathways, Sustainable Columbia, https://sustainable.columbia.edu/content/building-net-zero (2025); see also Linda Copman, Countdown to Net Zero Emissions, Sustainable Campus, https://sustainablecampus.cornell.edu/news/countdown-net-zero-emissions (April 3, 2024); see also Net Zero by 2050, Harvard Management Company, https://www.hmc.harvard.edu/net-zero/ (2024); see also Net Zero Emissions by 2048, Office of Sustainability, https://sustainability.wisc.edu/goals/achieve-net-zero-emissions/ (2023). ↩︎
17. Id. at 830. ↩︎
18. Id. at 845. ↩︎
19. Id. ↩︎
20. Id. at 852. ↩︎
21. Id. at 853. ↩︎
22. Id. at 851. ↩︎
23. Id. at 855. ↩︎
24. Id. ↩︎
25. Id. at 858. ↩︎
26. Mollie Cohen D’Agostino et al., Transportation Decarbonization, 24 VT. J. ENV’T L. 29 at 62 (2022). ↩︎
27. Legal Pathways to Deep Carbonization, 82 BROOK. L. REV. at 833. ↩︎