SUNY College of Envionmental Science and Forestry
Contact Information
Education and Research:
What may be an extraordinary educational and research focus on sustainability at most other institutions is ordinary at ESF. Each of the eight College’s departments: Chemistry, Construction Management and Wood Products Engineering, Environmental and Forest Biology, Environmental Resources and Forest Engineering, Environmental Studies, Forest and Natural Resources Management, Landscape Architecture and Bioprocessing and Paper Engineering immerse every one of our approximately 2200 undergraduate and graduate students in the study and practice of sustainability. New minors in Renewable Energy and Sustainable Construction have been added. A significant portion of our almost $15M in annual research expenditures falls under the umbrella of sustainability. It is not surprising that most of our over 18,200 alumni are employed or studying in the area of sustainability.
Cornerstones of an ESF education include required universal experiences for all our freshmen. These include courses in Writing and the Environment, Global Environment, and orientation seminars focusing on environmental stewardship. Each year all freshmen are assigned required reading related to sustainability and participate in discussions throughout the semester. This year’s selection is Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us.
Public service is a vital component of ESF’s mission reflecting our commitment to making the world a better place. Students enrolled in 19 service learning courses last year concentrating on one or more areas of sustainability. Community Service hours totaled almost 13,500 last year with over 3065 participants in 26 activities with sustainability as a real component from cleaning local streams and hiking trails, a program on Women in Nature to cleaning school grounds with 5th graders. International experiences include Engineers Without Boarders planning and designing a gravity-fed water system for a village in Honduras and the Society for Conservation Biology building 16 eco-friendly stoves for a village in the Dominican Republic.
The student-run Green Campus Initiative is ESF’s campus activist group that aims to revolutionize the school to “practice what we teach!” Current projects include clothing swaps, providing locally grown food, waste audits, making recycled notebooks and managing the campus composting program by turning institutional food waste into energy and fertilizer by running the spiral-form plug flow digester. Our students standardized our greenhouse gas inventory and reporting system and it is now used by the College to track its carbon emissions annually. Earth Day is an annual week-long celebration at ESF with multiple forums, poster sessions and speakers.
ESF’s sustainability programs reach beyond our campus. This past year over 450 high school students earned college credit taking our Global Environment and Writing and the Environment courses. Twenty-two workshops and programs with a sustainability focus drew 2,844 participants. The College’s Feinstone Award speaker, Dr. John Holdren, Director of Woods Hole Research Center and now President Obama’s science advisor, drew a capacity crowd in October for his campus lecture “Science and Economics and Sustainability: Managing the Competing Uses of Land Water and Forests Under a Changing Climate.” Our “Going Green” video series is devoted to environmental problem solving and airs weekly on Time Warner Cable’s news channels.
Campus Operations:
ESF has maintained a consistent footprint for its buildings over the past twenty years. The College vigilantly considers environmental issues associated with expanding campus buildings and the loss of green space. We have recently completed a major renovation of our computing and engineering building, and are in the process of achieving Silver LEED certification for the building. All new campus buildings will be built to at least LEED Gold certification. We are in the final design phase of a new campus “gateway” building that will be built to LEED Platinum standards. The design is the product of student, staff and faculty input over a 5 year period. The new building is designed to consume approximately 30,000 BTU/square foot annually. In addition the building will incorporate a biomass combined heat and power plant that will replace 60% of the fossil fuel heating on campus, and over 15% of the campus electrical needs. The building will also incorporate significant photovoltaic arrays, a green roof, and rain gardens. These technologies will be highlighted in the building to be used for teaching and outreach.
ESF has adopted sustainable on-site energy resources to improve system energy efficiencies and reduce GHG. Photovoltaic systems and a molten carbonate fuel cell now account for approximately 20% or the campus electric energy use.
ESF’s 250 kW fuel cell was dedicated Feb. 21, 2006, and was one of the first fuel cells adopted on a college campus. The fuel cell generates electricity more efficiently than traditional grid generation, and significant additional efficiencies are improved by using the heat produced to heat Walters Hall in the winter by means of a heat exchanger. This innovative technology is used extensively focus in engineering and environmental science courses and as demonstrations for our community outreach programs.
In 2007 and 2008 photovoltaic arrays were installed providing approximately 40 kW of capacity on campus. Based on these demonstrations an additional 65Kw of photovoltaic projects are being designed for installation in 2009-10.
In 2006 a roof garden was installed on Walters Hall featuring succulent herbaceous plants. In 2008, bio retention basins were added to campus to also provide sustainability benefits. Green roof and bio retention basins also slow the rate of runoff and reduce the volume of storm water entering sewers by up to 80 percent.
Students are producing biodiesel from waste cooking oil on campus to reduce 20% of the campus diesel fuel needs. The project is being expanded to a student run energy cooperative to make use of all waste oil. The business plan, energy analysis and the design of the new production facilities will be completed by students during 2009.
ESF has adopted flex fuel vehicles, electric vehicles and hybrids as part of its efforts to reduce transportation emissions. In addition we are installing a fueling station that allows customs blends of biodiesel/diesel and gasoline/ethanol to allow the maximum use of alternative fuels in the vehicles we purchased. The biodiesel tanks are also a necessary component of our student run biodiesel business.
Administration and Finance:
Founded in 1911 as a professional school for forestry and forest conservation, the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) is the nation’s oldest and most respected school dedicated to the study of the environment, developing renewable technologies and building a sustainable future. The President of ESF has signed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment and ESF is working towards its goal of being carbon neutral by 2015.
ESF planning framework for development and environmental stewardship began in 2001 producing Vision 2020, a campus-wide strategic plan. The College mission was revised to “advance knowledge and skills and to promote the leadership necessary for the stewardship of both the natural and designed environments.” A Campus Master Planning effort was born, charging the campus community with redesigning the campus with the most sustainable practices possible. ESF students and faculty performed an initial estimate of the college CO2 emissions in 2000. The analysis has been updated twice since that time, most recently in 2008, to quantify and gauge our progress in meeting our goals. In 2007, ESF formed a Campus Climate Change Committee led by the President of the College and comprised of students, faculty and staff. In 2007 ESF hired a full time sustainability coordinator reporting to the President. Currently the campus community is engaged in completing the design for an energy efficient building to serve as the sustainable focal point for the campus.
The College’s sustainability efforts are visible not only on the 12 acres in Syracuse, but also on the 25,000 acres of its regional campuses throughout Central New York and the Adirondack Park. We have managed our extensive forestland under sustainable principles that were part of our initial educational mission and these forests provide a significant carbon sequestration opportunity benefiting the environment.
Recently the college has implemented some significant energy conservation policies including a temperature policy to guide heating and cooling temperatures with a target savings of 10%. Between Christmas 2008 and New Years, the College closed specifically to accrue energy savings. A pilot program reducing the work week to 4.5 days was implemented in the summer 2009 to analyze energy savings with possible expansion to the academic year. Purchasing policies were put in place to ensure energy star savings for all computer purchases.
ESF was included as one of 71 distinctive colleges chosen for the 2007 edition of the Making a Difference Colleges guide based upon the college's strong environmental focus, as well as its variety of service learning and field study options, interdisciplinary programs, and other factors. ESF received high marks for environmental action in Campus Environment 2008: A National Report Card on Sustainability and Higher Education, issued by the National Wildlife Federation. In addition, ESF was among the colleges and universities described as “exemplary and committed” in the category, “Exemplary Schools for Students Taking a Course on Ecology or Sustainability.” The College was also listed as exemplary in the category that examined “Environmental or Sustainability Goal Setting.”
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