This list of commitments has been developed in consultation with the organizations which support We Are Still In. They reflect the types of actions that leading organizations and institutions are taking to mitigate, adapt to, and communicate about climate change, and are aligned with existing initatives and commitment platforms.
To share your own commitments, join We Are Still In.
Electric vehicles for personal and commercial use are, along with automation, a major trend coming to scale quickly. The proper infrastructure to support EVs will be critical to capture their benefits. Consider partnership with the largest local commercial fleet operators to pilot new ideas.
Building electricity, heating, and cooling at the community-scale is, with transportation, the other major source of carbon emissions. Strategies will vary between single-family homes, multi-family residential housing, and commercial buildings. Conducting energy audits and using benchmarking is an excellent tool to drive efficiency. Incentive programs for energy upgrades can be done effectively the more buildings that participate.
Ultimately, we must transition to communities powered by 100% clean, renewable energy. That transition should ensure benefit to low-income communities, a just transition for displaced workers in fossil fuel jobs, equitable access and affordability. If you are ready to set a 100% goal for your community, the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 campaign can help build support for your vision. Join the nearly 70 US communities with 100% goals.
Companies joining RE100 make a commitment to 100% renewable electricity across their operations , working to increase corporate demand for – and delivery of – renewable energy.
Click learn more for additional information, including the criteria joining.
To meet ambitious climate goals, campuses must find cost effective ways to decarbonize energy supply. Aggregations helps enable smaller institutions to access the market and larger institutions to diversify their energy portfolio in a financially meaningful way. Start this process through attending Aggregation workshops via Second Nature or other partners.This is awarded as a Mark of Distinction for Second Nature Commitment Signatories.
In adopting a leadership role as an environmentally responsible cultural institution, and institution would commit to pursuing some or all of the following:
This free practice management tool is designed by doctors and it really works– we have the experience and the know-how! We provide everything your office needs for a complete environmental sustainability program: office policies, PowerPoints, a step-by-step guide for Green Teams, and even free advice by telephone.
By committing to adapt to the impacts of a changing climate, companies and institutions can secure their operations and supply chains and conserve natural resources that are stressed due to climate change. While there is much a business can do within their community, primary among these options is reducing water usage. Organizations can commit to increase their own water security through a range of actions, including installing water-saving devices, capturing rainwater for onsite uses, and recycling grey water. Or just commit to get engaged with your community in resilience planning.
Commit to offering education opportunities that are designed for staff, adults, and children, and feature information on clean energy, stewardship, individual/household climate actions, climate advocacy, and any other applicable subjects. The importance of building environmental literacy in changing habits and perceptions is profound, and organizations and institutions trusted to convene the community are among the most impactful educators.
The Resilience Assessment is a key process to understand current strengths and vulnerabilities of the campus and community. This should be completed through research, in person forums, or other processes to engage your stakeholders in this assessment.
Using your own preferred methodology, create a internal carbon price or tax to help incentivize and or fund carbon reduction efforts. This can be a parallel or separate effort to supporting national or local carbon pricing policies, with your institution as an example of the policy in action
A Revolving Fund is a financing mechanism targeted to campus climate action projects that lower emissions, increase capacity for future projects, and reduce operating costs. Successful funds are at minimum 1% of the institution’s endowment value, or seeded at one million dollars. This is awarded as a Mark of Distinction for Second Nature Commitment Signatories.
Commit to holding a public campus and community forum or workshop on shared climate action plan goal setting and/or resilience assessments. These forums will compare baseline targets and align the strengths of the respective sectors to drive solutions. This is awarded as a Mark of Distinction for Second Nature Commitment Signatories.
Examples: University Climate Change Coalition; Community Resilience Building
Action cannot be taken without awareness. Develop sustainability messaging for your website, social media content, or engage concert attendees on pledges to reduce CO 2 e missions, eliminate single-use plastic bottles, etc.
Companies and institutional investors joining to EV100 are committed to driving the transition to electro-mobility, leveraging corporate leadership as a crucial catalyst for building market demand and to establishing electric vehicles as the mainstream solution by 2030.
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Only about 23% of plastic bottles are recycled within the U.S.1 By providing hydration stations on tour, encouraging fans to bring refillable water containers, where allowed to performances, and ensuring tour buses and catering are stocked with environmentally preferable hydration options, will reduce the use of single-use plastic bottles.
The long-held practice of creating object exhibition and storage climate conditions of 70० +/-2० and 50% +/- 5% principle is no longer considered best practice. Instead, curators and conservators are determining appropriate conditions based on the conservation needs and history of the object and its materials, and by applying scientifically-proven concepts of materials’ conservation needs and thresholds, and the safe energy savings of night-time and seasonal drift to care for the objects while saving significantly on energy use.
below50 is a global campaign that brings together companies and organizations who commit to growing the global market for the most sustainable fuels and scaling up their deployment – that is fuels producing at least 50% less CO2 emissions than conventional fossil fuels.
Climate change poses serious risks to the global economy, yet investors and financial markets lack clear and comparable information about which companies or assets are most exposed and which are best prepared. Companies making this commitment agree to implement the recommendations of the TCFD for reporting climate-related financial information in mainstream reports (annual financial filings) as fully as practicable over the next three years.
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Most companies begin by assessing energy usage or performing an energy audit to identify opportunities to increase energy efficiency throughout their facilities and operations. Energy reduction targets can be framed as either absolute reductions or reductions that are normalized per unit of production, such as per tons shipped, per dollars of revenue produced, or other relevant business metric. Some examples of commitments that can be taken include:
Increasing your percentage of renewable energy sources is a key component of reducing overall GHG emissions. Installing onsite renewable generation, like solar panels, is a good long-term strategy if possible. But renewable energy can also be procured through Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), renewable power purchasing agreements (PPAs), and in some locations from retail electricity providers or local utilities that offers a high percentage of renewable power. Also consider becoming an EPA Green Power Partner.
Join some of the world’s leading businesses that are setting ambitious, ‘science-based’ emissions reductions targets that ensure their GHG reduction targets meet the level of ambition needed to limit the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C.
Click learn more for additional information including the criteria for having a target approved by the initiative
Using proper verification protocols, campuses can use landholdings to sequester carbon. In the cases of large university landholders, this can provide significant “negative carbon emissions” if properly managed. This strategy could be cross-sectorally combined with a public land protection strategy.
Commit to incorporating messages of conservation, stewardship, and the importance of climate action into sermons and talks with your congregation or community
There are many ways to reduce the climate impact of packaging including reducing materials (i.e., “source reduction”); replacing virgin materials with post-consumer recycled content; replacing traditional plastics made from fossil fuels with biopolymers; re-designing packaging to be more compact and therefore efficient for transport and storage; using biodegradable packing materials; and recycling at end of the packaging’s life to name just a few practices.
Short-lived climate pollutants—such as black carbon, methane, tropospheric ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons—are powerful climate warmers many times more potent than CO2 over their lifetimes. Because they are short-lived in the atmosphere, actions to reduce these super pollutants can have substantial, near-term climate, agricultural and health benefits and are an essential complement to CO2 reduction strategies. Policy-makers can announce regulatory or voluntary approaches to drastically reduce SLCPs, such as developing methane strategies or adopting rules on use of warming HFCs. Organizations can commit to engage with suppliers to provide training, conduct pollutant inventories, and establish systems for tracking, measuring, and monitoring these types of emissions. Analysis shows that SLCP emissions can be cost-effectively reduced by an estimated 40-50 percent by 2030.
Policymakers, companies and organizations are encouraged to accept the #SLCPChallenge of the U.S. Climate Alliance, which calls for ambitious action on SLCPs. Feel free to elaborate on your work towards reduction, along with your other efforts, in the "Other Commitments" field below.
All tours, big or small, can calculate and offset all emissions generated from a tour and acquire an offset of CO2 emissions. The majority of the CO2 emissions from touring are from fan travel. You can encourage fans to carpool and take mass transit to the shows to reduce this.
Every year in the United States, approximately 31% (133 billion pounds) of the overall food supply is wasted, which impacts food security, resource conservation, and contributes to the 18% of total U.S. methane emissions that come from landfills2. Coordinate with caterers and venues to donate excess food to local shelters and food banks, where regulations allow it.
Institutions can significantly reduce the impact of materials use through life-cycle planning, choosing low-impact materials, and developing convenient, clear, waste-management approaches. Begin by conducting materials or waste audits for regular activities such as exhibit construction, special events, office operations, food service areas, and gift shops. Then, by piloting new practices in specific departments or single events or time periods, you can develop tools and procedures that significantly reduce waste through simple practices. Associated with this commitment, institutions could:
Organizations making a commitment to reduce the climate impact of transportation should consider practices such as measuring transportation greenhouse gas emissions and setting reduction targets, switching fuels, optimizing the efficiency of shipping operations, and reducing transit- and travel-related greenhouse gas emissions. Businesses can develop a green transportation action plan to map the movement of goods to market and identify opportunities to increase efficiency. Organizations can buy hybrid and electric vehicles within their own fleet, and can reduce the footprint of their workforce through incentivizing public transportation, installing EV charging stations, promoting telework, and locating near transit centers.
There are many simple and easy ways to decrease waste while on tour. This includes: coordinating with venues, concessionaires and catering to reduce waste at the source by using environmentally preferable serve-ware and straws; consulting with catering to to make entire service plastic-free, aiding venues and caterers in reducing non-reusable water bottle consumption; collecting and recycling guitar strings, collecting and properly disposing of used batteries.
Restoring our forest’s ability to store carbon on a global scale is a critical and cost-effective climate mitigation solution. Making a commitment to eliminate deforestation means setting targets to assure key commodities in your supply chain (like palm, soy, beef, paper and pulp) are from deforestation-free sources. An ideal target could be to establish a disclosure and reporting plan for your supply chain and/or conversion to 100% deforestation-free commodities by 2020.
Join companies and investors that are helping to shape government policy on climate, taking early action and leadership, and showcasing their commitment to a safer and more prosperous economy.
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While individual organization action is necessary, local and federal government action is also needed to reach global climate goals. Your organization can have a critical voice in advancing public policy. A commitment to responsible engagement in climate policy means that your organization commits to supporting public policy to: promote energy efficiency and renewable energy; increase investment in a clean energy economy; support climate change adaptation, or put a price on carbon.
Companies and institutional investors joining EP100 pledge to double their energy productivity and do more with less, joining a global, collaborative initiative of influential businesses that are significantly contributing to reducing energy demand and limiting temperature rise to well below 2°C.
Click learn more for additional information, including the criteria joining.
The Health Care Climate Challenge mobilizes health care institutions around the globe to protect public health from climate change. The challenge is based on three pillars:
Mitigation – Reduce health care’s own carbon footprint. Resilience – Prepare for the impacts of extreme weather and the shifting burden of disease. Leadership – Educate staff and the public about climate and health and promote policies to protect public health from climate change.
After enrolling, the Health Care Climate Challenge provides participants with easy-to-use resources to help support climate-smart solutions and a login to submit data. For Practice Greenhealth members, data can be automatically uploaded from the Climate page of the Environmental Excellence Awards.
The natural systems upon which we depend are essential to life and critical for reducing the impacts of climate change on our communities. These systems are also under threat from human activity and climate change. Maintaining the resilience of natural and working lands is an important part of any GHG emission reduction strategy. It is also important to securing the well-being of communities, economies and ecosystems. Actions that secure and enhance the “carbon base,” such as land conservation, restoration, and improved management, also support watersheds and food systems, improve air quality, protect against urban heat islands and sea level rise, and preserve the beauty and function of natural areas and parks. Those that accept the NWL Challenge should commit to securing natural and working lands as a resilient net sink of carbon. This will take different forms for different actors. For example, local, sub-national and national jurisdictions might take a broad approach like that of the U.S. Climate Alliance. Landowners and managers may wish to focus on restoration and implementing climate-smart practices on their own lands. Businesses may look at their supply chains and customers as potential partners, and incorporate natural and working goals into their own climate change commitments and strategies.
The U.S. Climate Alliance States commit to taking actions that will reduce GHG emissions and increase carbon sequestration in forests, farms, rangelands, wetlands and urban greenspace, and integrating these pathways into state GHG mitigation plans by 2020. The Natural and Working Lands Challenge calls on other states, cities, nations, tribes, businesses and others to make the same commitment within their organizations. Feel free to elaborate on your work towards this challenge, along with your other efforts, in the "Other Commitments" field below.
Understanding your GHG emissions is the first step to making measurable reductions in those emissions. The EPA provides an overview report and CoolClimate Network provides a simple tool for “low emitters” to better understand sources of emissions, as well as how to use that information to set reduction targets. For this commitment, it is as simple as committing to complete a greenhouse gas inventory for your business or oganization, but in the future your inventory can be used to make a commitment to set a specific goal, such as “reduce GHG emissions by 50% by 2025.
Plans, strategies, and their implementation should include the input and priorities of the community. Having your residents’ support and involvement will lead to better long term solutions. Simply holding an open public hearing is not sufficient for the inclusion of all residents. Many methods exist for successful community engagement.
Responsible water management is fundamental to ensure long-term resilience and is vital to achieving carbon ambitions. Companies can demonstrate their commitment to being responsible water stewards through this program of actions laid out by the Business Alliance for Water and Climate (BAFWAC).
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Energy efficiency is the best way to save taxpayer money and cut climate pollution right now. The average building wastes about a third of the energy it uses. Consider implementing a strategic energy management plan for all major operations.
In many communities, the transportation sector is the largest share of their pollution and getting people to use alternative modes of transit to the personal vehicle comes with a myriad of benefits, not only cutting greenhouse gases.
Commit to integrate climate change-related risks and opportunities in portfolio analysis and decision-making processes through one or more of the following:
Aligning college or university investments that are aligned with both the mission of the university and climate solutions can create significant win-win-win opportunities. Funding emerging innovations in clean energy through dedicating part of the investment portfolio can create new markets for climate solutions, help campuses meet socially-responsible climate targets through new products and services that reduce carbon emissions, and provide strong financial returns to meet fiduciary responsibility.
Join the LCTPi, a collaborative platform for businesses and policymakers to scale up deployment of business solutions to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.
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The Renewable Energy RFI will compile the energy demand data across participating U.S. cities and ask renewable energy developers for price estimates for projects that would meet their collective energy demand. To participate, cities are not asked to commit to contracts, only to share the electricity use and how much of that they want to come from renewables by 2040. We Are Still In will put you in contact with the program organizers to answer your questions. You can also contact info@climate-mayors.org.
Investors commit to increasing investments in appropriate low carbon opportunities such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, low carbon transportation, energy storage and energy efficient buildings. Investors commit to reporting and sharing those commitments and those investments.
Climate Mayors, founded in 2014, is a bipartisan, peer-to-peer network of over 400 U.S. mayors working together to demonstrate leadership on climate through meaningful actions in their communities, and to express and build political will for effective federal and global policy action.
Investors commit to phasing out our investments in thermal coal activities (specifically thermal coal mining and coal-fired power generation).
Food is often overlooked as a source of greenhouse gas pollution. What it takes to produce, how far is travels to get to consumers and what’s done with food that’s not eaten all lead to major carbon pollution. Producing more food locally, running programs with restaurants and institutions to reduce food waste, and cutting back on carbon intense foods such as meat and poultry are important steps.
Powering your own operations with renewable electricity or using local government buildings and land to site solar PV panels is within the decision-making authority of most localities and can be a model to your community.
Join a growing group of forward-looking companies that are using an internal carbon price to help manage climate risk and align themselves with the low-carbon transition.
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Disclosure of your climate targets, emissions profile, and actions on a transparent platform is important for accountability to your residents and is increasingly necessary to access tools and financial resources.
Companies making this commitment are taking action to reduce ‘short-lived climate pollutants’ (SLCPs) – including methane, black carbon, tropospheric ozone and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) – vital to significantly reducing near-term global warming and improving public health.
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Undertaking this commitment aligns with the work of the US Climate Alliance, which is prioritizing this challenge. Feel free to elaborate on your work towards reduction, along with your other efforts, in the "Other Commitments" field below.
By endorsing this initiative, companies commit to removing commodity-driven deforestation from their supply chains, combating a significant source of emissions and making their supply chains more sustainable and resilient.
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Electric fleet vehicles, especially buses, have a range of benefits that make them an excellent investment for local government use. Cities are coming together to spur innovation amongst manufacturers and use their collective purchasing power to drive down cost.
Investors commit to report on existing investment allocations to low carbon investments and on existing targets and commitments to making additional low carbon investment.
Investors commit to improving disclosures on the climate change-related risks and opportunities in their portfolios, in line with the recommendations of the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) for asset owners and asset managers.
Many campus climate action plans have not been updated in nearly a decade and much in the world has changed since they were first created. Build off of existing examples of climate action plans within the private sector, and/or look at local, city, state, regional, or international examples to allign or exceed your climate goals with new updates. These revisions could also be done in conjunction with a cross-sector forum.
We all know the best way to measure, and actually achieve success, is to set a goal. Making that goal inline with or stronger than the U.S. nationally determined contribution under Paris signals that local governments are doing their part. Hundreds of cities and counties across the U.S. see an emissions reduction target of this level ambitious but doable.
Investors commit to supporting the Climate Action 100+ initiative with the aim of securing commitments from boards and senior management to:
President’s Climate Leadership Commitments are signed by Higher Education presidents and chancellors. They can sign either the Carbon or the Resilience Commitment, or the integrated Climate Commitment. The commitments require strong leadership to create a implementation structures on campuses, complete GHG inventories, develop climate action plans and consistently report on progress.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel held the North American Climate Summit in December 2017. Mayors gathered for the Summit were invited to make commitments to move forward with significant emissions reductions. Signing the Charter, you can pledge to move forward a comprehensive climate agenda and get support from your peers tackling similar challenges.
Signatories of the Low Carbon Investment statement declare their support for the continued development of the green bond market, in line with global best practice, and will invest in green bonds when investment characteristics are comparable and consistent with investment objectives.
Investors commit to supporting CDP’s annual disclosure request to over 5,000 companies. Investors also commit to supporting CDP’s Investor Action request to over 1,000 high impact companies which asks these companies to:
The Marks of Distinction recognize performance among a select group of higher education institutions. For campuses that are part of the Climate Leadership Network, performing exemplary activities that illustrate climate leadership is crucial to inspire new climate action with your students, alumni, and community.
One of the most important things local governments can do when it comes to addressing climate change is to prepare for its effects--severe storms, drought, flooding, heat waves and more. Local government is already pledged to provide for the health and safety of their residents from these hazards. Climate change will make them worse and understanding and accounting for what’s to come in existing official documents is part of that responsibility.
Going beyond the local government’s own operations to make renewable energy available to your community is a challenging, but critical step that means working with utilities, state government, and your residents. Clean, renewable bring with them better air, predictable, increasingly lower customer pricing, and local job deployment opportunities.