Urgency of climate issue tops priority for 1st University of Michigan ... - MLive.com

Urgency of climate issue tops priority for 1st University of Michigan sustainability head - mlive.com

ANN ARBOR, MI - Shana Weber learned her love for the environment early in life.

Her Michigan parents took her camping as a child across the state. Her father was an engineer in the corporate world who pushed environmental policies before it was called sustainability. Her mother was an artist who would share quotes from literature or songs about nature.

“They really instilled in me a spirit of love and care for for the environment,” Weber said.

In September, Weber will start leading University of Michigan’s environmental efforts as its first associate vice president for campus sustainability. She sees college campuses as the ideal place to figure out best sustainability practices.

“We all know how challenging it is to change habits at any scale,” she said, “but I also am inspired by human ingenuity and creativity. What better than a college campus to kind of bring all of the best of our human talent together to to solve these issues.”

Weber focused her academic career in sustainability disciplines, earning an undergraduate degree in zoology from Ohio State University and a doctorate and master’s degree in environmental science from Indiana University.

One of her first inspirations toward environmental work was as a competitive rower, as she won Female Athlete of the Year for Indiana University Club Sports in 1999. She occasionally found herself rowing in unclean waterways, she said.

“You experience waterways in lots of other parts of the country,” she said, “and you very quickly realize you want those waterways to be clean.”

In the early 2000s, she helped Santa Clara University in California set up its first Environmental Studies Institute. The work brought students into “tinkering on campus with sustainability questions,” and Weber was able to observe how these problems could be solved in real-time.

“That was sort of the seed of this idea of using a campus as a living laboratory or campus as a demonstration site for problem solving,” she said.

Back then, sustainability was defined as basically “do no harm today so that future generations can still thrive,” Weber said. Her thinking has evolved over the last two decades to see sustainability as an ongoing process.

“In this phase in my career, I’m really thinking about how do you create that environment where decision making and behaviors are more easily practiced,” she said, “and then of course that has ripple effect beyond the location where you’re doing that.”

Read more: Sustainability goals on schedule at University of Michigan despite built-in hurdles

From New Jersey to Ann Arbor

Weber has about one more month as Princeton University’s founding director of its Office of Sustainability. University of Michigan’s Board of Regents approved her appointment during its July 20 meeting. She will report to Geoffrey Chatas, the university’s chief financial officer, starting Sept. 5.

She will come to an Ann Arbor campus that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from purchased power to net zero (Scope 1) by 2025, as well as eliminating emissions from on-campus sources (Scope 2) by 2040. The university is on pace to cut both Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions in half by 2025, university officials said.

Read more: Carbon slashed 25% at University of Michigan ahead of schedule, officials say

The university has set metrics for six sustainability goals -- reduce carbon emissions, reduce chemical applications to campus landscapes, reduce carbon output on university vehicles, reduce waste sent to landfills, purchase from more local, sustainable food sources and invest in sustainability education.

The aggressiveness of the university’s sustainability goals was appealing to Weber in taking the job, as well as the concrete nature of the goals, she said.

“Metrics are critical,” she said. “We can have lofty visions and all the best intentions in mind, but if we don’t give ourselves targets to hold ourselves accountable to, it’s hard to galvanize a community around it.”

Her interactions with university officials, including President Santa Ono, was also encouraging since it showed the whole campus is aligned on sustainability, she said. Ono made the university the lead institution for the University Climate Change Coalition, which he heads.

Construction is ongoing on campus in two key sustainability areas: geothermal wells and solar arrays. Geothermal energy uses resources below the Earth’s surface along with a heat exchanger to either add or remove heat from a building, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Both of those initiatives come with logistical complications, said Drew Horning, UM’s interim assistant vice president for campus sustainability in March 2023, such as costs in the billions of dollars, lack of space for solar arrays and disrupting city power grids.

Weber’s experience at Princeton will be helpful in navigating these issues, as she learned that leaning on campus experts and consultants is vital to gain the trust of city government, she said.

“It’s disruptive,” she said of the necessary construction work in sustainability efforts. “There’s a lot of work to do to acknowledge the disruption, but also to celebrate what it means...like the big why behind it so that the community can be more tolerant of the disruption while it’s happening.”

While sustainability is a process, Weber said, decisions need to be made now to reduce carbon neutrality and save the environment.

“We don’t have a lot of time to address the carbon issue,” she said. “We have a short window, so these are decisions we have to make today to set ourselves up for carbon neutrality.”

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