Franklin Pierce University staff and students are taking on climate change with the launch of the college’s Institute for Climate action last week.
The organization, which will be run by Franklin Pierce faculty and staff with student involvement, will work to increase education on climate change, as well as promoting sustainable practices on campus. It’s a new incarnation of the university’s Monadnock Institute of Nature, Place and Culture, though with a narrower focus, said co-coordinator Gerald Burns.
One of the last projects on the Monadnock Institute of Nature, Place and Culture was the production of the documentary “From Hurricane to Climate Change” in 2016, tracking some of the flooding events in the region dating back to the Hurricane of 1938 to events in the last 20 years. That film became the catalyst for the Institute for Climate Action in its current form.
“We’re very happy Franklin Pierce is stepping up to this challenge,” Burns said in an interview Monday. “We see a lot of opportunities for the institution and for our students to get involved.”
“Our university has a long history of preserving and protecting the natural environment around us and for decades has played a key role in convening conversations about regional sustainability,” Franklin Pierce University President Kim Mooney said in a press release issued last week. “By establishing the new Institute for Climate Action, we hope to focus our efforts on finding and implementing solutions that address the climate crisis.”
Catherine Owen Koning, a professor of environmental science at the university and co-coordinator of the institute, said the project is three-pronged.
The first is to increase education among its own student population through curriculum development and co-curricular programming.
“We already have a lot of that going on in our required science classes, but we’re looking at how to make students more aware of the repercussions of climate change, and what to do about it,” Koning said.
There will also be a Campus Sustainability Council, which will look at ways the campus can contribute to reducing energy usage, for example.
The campus has two wood pellet boilers, one to fuel its athletic complex and one heating two dormitories. The Sustainability Council will look for other sustainable options moving forward.
The other piece is the Community Climate Consortium, which will extend the Institute for Climate Action’s mission off campus.
During the kickoff event for the Institute for Climate Action on Thursday, the college invited regional organizations invested in sustainability to participate. About 20 local organizations attended, and several have already expressed interest in partnerships with the college through student internships.
“We want to make common cause with these local organizations, in the belief that only that will build the cultural and political will to act on a large scale,” Burns said. “That’s the bottom line – we think collaboration is the key to a large response to climate change.”
Koning said the institute will also be reaching out to social clubs such as rotaries and women’s clubs to attend their meetings to give presentations on how members can be more sustainable.