Amherst College

College Sustainability Report Card 2007

Amherst College sought a Mellon grant to employ an energy manager, in cooperation with Five Colleges, Incorporated, to reduce the College's energy consumption and its environmental footprint. The manager has initiated plans for green building, lighting retrofits, and the new cogeneration plant that is under construction. Savings from these changes will continue to fund this position when the grant expires. The College recently formed a Green Campus Advisory Panel, which will assist and advise the College on development and implementation of sustainability policies.

Amherst College has performed a carbon emissions inventory and is using the results as a basis for its participation in the Cities for Climate Protection program in which the College pledges to assist the town of Amherst in reducing its carbon emissions to 35 percent below the pre-1997 levels by 2009. The cornerstone of the College's energy efficiency program is a $5 million cogeneration plant that is currently under construction. When operational, the plant will lower the College's greenhouse gas emissions far in excess of the intended 35 percent. As part of the Million Monitor Drive, the College committed to purchasing 175,000 kilowatt-hours of wind-powered Renewable Energy Certificates, enough to power all of the computers on campus for a year.

The College contracts with eight different local food producers to supply a variety of foods for the dining halls. This initiative supports local businesses and reduces transportation distances for food delivered to the College. Dining services recycles much of its waste, including kitchen oil, and is currently evaluating methods for a post-consumer food waste composting process.

The College has used sustainable design strategies for newly constructed and renovated facilities over the past five years. Although it has not pursued LEED certification for these projects, the College has adhered to the principles articulated in LEED guidelines, as well as those documented in the College's "High Performance Building Design Stategies" guidelines. These guidelines allow the College to make informed value judgments about which design strategies have the highest environmental and financial returns.

The College makes neither its proxy voting record nor its list of endowment holdings public. Detailed information regarding the College’s endowment holdings is only available to trustees and senior administrators, while broad investment activities for the year are disclosed in the annual financial statements. However, in instances where the College has taken a specific policy stance, it actively makes this public and engages in a dialogue with its investment partners, as was the case with its recent divestment from Sudan to protest the violence in Darfur.

The college prioritizes investing to maximize profit and is also invested in renewable energy investment funds or similar investment vehicles.

The investment of Amherst's endowment is managed by the College's investment office in collaboration with a formal investment committee. While the College does not have a formal policy to which individual investment managers must adhere, the College maintains a proactive and on-going dialogue with the managers with respect to proxy issues and their voting of the proxies.