Blog Archive for October 2014

October 24, 2014

by Kate Gordon, Executive Director, Risky Business Project


I grew up in and around universities. As the child of a law professor, I spent time in Buffalo, NY, Madison, WI, and Palo Alto, CA, often doing my homework at the back of lecture halls and empty classrooms. Ultimately I ended up at Wesleyan for my B.A., and then at UC Berkeley for joint degrees in law and city planning, paving the way for my current work on energy and climate policy.


Even with all this exposure to academia, I only fully grasped the role that universities can play in fighting climate change a few weeks ago, when I was lucky enough to spend a day at the annual conference of the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment. I was there to talk about the Risky Business Project, an initiative co-chaired by former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and long-time investor and climate activist Tom Steyer. The project takes a classic business risk assessment approach to climate change and identifies specific risks facing each region of the U.S. in three major sectors: energy demand, coastal infrastructure, and commodity agriculture. Our research also identified significant impacts on mortality rates and labor productivity from global temperature increases.

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October 23, 2014

by Timothy Carter, President, Second Nature

One month ago I began a new chapter in my career, accepting the challenging and thrilling opportunity to join Second Nature as its third president. As someone working on environmental issues in higher education for the past 13 years, I have been aware of the rich legacy and commitment of the organization to lead and accelerate bold commitments to sustainability in higher education that transform society.

The network generated by the ACUPCC is arguably the strongest collection of presidential leadership in higher education relating to sustainability anywhere in the world. Since 2007, these leaders gather regularly at the Presidential Summit on Climate Leadership to hear from expert speakers, share experiences with each other, and discuss the sustainability issues that are most pressing on their campuses. This conference has ranged in scope, size, and focus throughout the years but every Summit has had at its core a commitment to serve the members of the network in the best ways possible. On October 1-3, 2014 we held the seventh of these summits in Boston, and we are incredibly grateful for the time the more than 300 participants took to meaningfully engage with content and each other.

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