Last year we reported on the state of Duke University’s 2022 climate commitment with the verdict that, if given the money and mandate to succeed, it could be a model for how an organization—especially one of the wealthiest universities in the world—could use its unique position to address the climate crisis.
Buoyed by the fulfillment of a 2007 goal to reach carbon neutrality, the commitment received applause from institution insiders and skepticism from students, some of whom argued that the commitment was hypocritical as long as Duke declined to divest its endowment from fossil fuel companies.
At the time, Toddi Steelman, the university’s vice president and vice provost for climate and sustainability, said that “our actions speak louder than the words,” and that skeptics should stay tuned for future goals and projects. We checked back in with Steelman to ask about ongoing projects and the next big goal: net-zero emissions by 2050.
INDY: We first reported on the Climate Commitment back in April of 2024. What have you all been up to in the past year?
TODDI STEELMAN: We published an annual report documenting more than 70 activities, projects, and programs that are popping up across every corner of the university. One of the most exciting aspects of that annual report is that we crowdsourced it because we wanted folks from across the university to tell us what they were doing. We had projects in education, in our research space, in our operations space, in our community engagement space, some of which we had no idea were even going on.
I’m most excited about the progress that we’re making on climate fluency. One of our goals is to create a climate fluent campus so that every major is a climate major and every career becomes a climate career, because climate change is going to affect everybody, everywhere.
In order to do that, we have had a committee of faculty, staff and students that’s been working to develop a framework that will allow each school to develop its own version of climate fluency, because you wouldn’t want a student to become climate fluent the same way in nursing that you might want them to be in engineering. So we’re trying to find those pathways that allow each school to put its imprint on where we’re going.
Duke recently reached the big goal of carbon neutrality, which was a big goal set decades ago. What is the next big goal to shoot for?
We achieved carbon neutrality in 2024 which was very exciting for us. We are ahead of our peers in many respects on that front. We did it with carbon offsets, but we have also made enormous investments in renewable energy. We have a 100-megawatt [off-campus solar project] that will come online this year. We have made investments of more than $400 million in infrastructure and efficiencies to get us to where we are today, in addition to needing carbon offsets—because we’re not all the way there in just decarbonizing our own campus. Having achieved carbon neutrality, we are not content to rest there.
What we want to do now is establish a net-zero goal for 2050. We have a committee that is meeting now that will help us chart the path towards what it means to achieve a net-zero goal along with interim goals that allow us to really hold ourselves accountable to make progress in order to reach that 2050 goal.
In addition to that more ambitious goal, we now want to include our Duke University Health System, which was not included before. That basically expands our footprint by more than 60% in terms of what we need to do. It’s exciting for us to have both the opportunity and the challenge of trying to figure out how we’re going to do that.
What’s the difference between carbon neutrality and net-zero emissions?
Being carbon neutral basically means you are going to have an amount of carbon that you’re going to put out in the atmosphere every year, and then you’re going to match that with an amount of carbon offsets to make sure you come back to neutral every year.
Whereas net-zero, what you’re trying to do is decarbonize your entire entity as much as possible, and you reserve the use of carbon offsets for that very last increment. So the idea is to force you to decarbonize as much as you can, and then reserve the use of carbon offsets for the last little increment that is irresolvable just because of the way we function in society.
What impact do you think the new federal administration may have on Duke’s climate initiatives and goals?
We are only a couple of weeks into this new administration, and they’ve made a lot of bold moves. There’s been the articulation of a very clear energy security agenda in this administration. There are clear areas where our research dovetails nicely with that, including projects that we were already going to be doing that we will certainly continue. We continue to stand fully behind our climate commitment, so we will continue to push forward in all the areas where we said we were going to be working before, including education, research operations, and external engagement.
It may mean there are fewer research dollars in some areas. It may mean new opportunities are opening up where we might be doing things that we hadn’t fully considered in the past. We have to be smart about how we position ourselves to take advantage of those opportunities, and I think we also do not need to compromise on our values as we do so.
Have recent climate disasters like Hurricane Helene and the LA wildfires brought more attention or student interest to the climate commitment? Or have you seen that translate into energy on campus?
Whenever you have a true climate disaster in your state like Hurricane Helene, it brings home why we need to be doing this work. And we see some of the work that we’re already doing becomes more applicable to places like western North Carolina. A good example is a project that we had in eastern North Carolina after Hurricanes Florence and Dorian hit Carteret County, where our marine lab is, in 2018 and 2019.
We have an amazing faculty member down there, Liz DeMattia, who has worked with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Carteret County to create what she and those local teachers call a “resilience curriculum” to work with the K-12 students to talk about what it means to be resilient as an individual and a community. They use art and storytelling as a way to process what can be really hard feelings when your community is going through a disaster like that.
Teachers in western North Carolina heard about this curriculum and reached out to collaborate on setting up something similar in the wake of Helene.
It’s just a really tiny sliver of a story of how the work that has been going on since 2018 becomes relevant when you have a disaster take place in another part of the state and we’ve got faculty, staff and students who can help in that particular way. We want our neighbors in western North Carolina to recover and be as vibrant as they were before, and to do our part in that.
People will say it’s a one in 1,000 year kind of event, but statistics like that are really not very helpful to us anymore, because these events have become more common, and those numbers make it seem like we’re immune to these potential events, when actually we’re not. So it just brings it more home when you have something like this happen in your backyard.
Are there any parts of the climate commitment’s future plans that readers in the Triangle and North Carolina may find particularly relevant?
We have a variety of research projects that are located in Durham and in North Carolina. This wasn’t directly about the climate commitment but we launched the Community Engagement Center last week. President Vincent Price was there with Mayor Leonardo Williams and [Vice President for Durham & Community Affairs] Stelfanie Williams. We’re integrated into that work because we want to be plugged into Durham, Carteret County, and other places where we have a presence. And this hub will be a matchmaking center for a lot of work we’re going to do, including climate related work.
We have another project that is working with North Carolina state offices to create new insurance products. There’s a real challenge to insurance markets right now, because the price of risk that you pay for insurance is too low for the actual risk that we face when it comes to hurricanes and wildfires, so we’ve got a group that is working with underserved and overburdened rural communities in North Carolina to figure out how we can get them more access to risk management tools so that they can protect themselves from climate change.
The divestment conversation seems to be ongoing on campus. When we last spoke, you said that you didn’t agree that divestment was the right way forward, but that you were glad that students were bringing it up and pushing for it. How is that conversation going?
We are a mission driven institution that has a climate commitment. We also primarily have a fiduciary responsibility to manage that endowment in a way that has a return on investment that supports a variety of activities that we do across the university—financial aid, funding research funding professorships. So when we think about an endowment, we have to think about first, what is it accomplishing for us and what’s our fiduciary duty?
At the same time we have a climate commitment and we want to make sure that we are living our values in terms of what that means. That comes back to the question of if divestment is the right way for us to think about that.
I would say I’m not sure, because divestment is a really blunt tool for us to accomplish what might be a larger goal of, let’s say, decarbonizing our portfolio. What does it mean to do that in a financially responsible way? I can’t say that there’s anybody out there who really has figured this out, and so what we have done is to create a research project—leaning into our research mission as a university, so we have faculty, staff, and students— looking into how can we understand, actually, what the carbon footprint is of our portfolio if we wanted to ask that larger question about how we decarbonize it.
So we are working in partnership with our friends at DUMAC (the investment arm of the university) and trying to genuinely understand that question. And if we make progress on that I think it will be helpful, not only to us, but to everybody in the field who is wrestling with that question.
When we published last year I got a lot of skeptical emails. What do you generally say to someone who doesn’t believe that Duke actually stands behind the commitment, or that it’s actually making a difference?
There are two things I would say, and that depends on what direction the conversation is going.
On one hand, I’m genuinely interested as to why somebody would have those doubts. What are you hearing, or what are you not seeing, or what can I show you about what we’re doing? Because I’ve devoted my entire life to this. It’s something that I fully believe in. So tell me more about why you don’t believe it’s real, because I genuinely want to know why.
The other piece is, genuinely, let me show you what we are doing. We just put out this annual report showing that there are over 70 projects in every corner of the university. I guarantee you we’ll have more next year, as it grows and grows and grows. There are always going to be people who are skeptical of large institutions like Duke. I understand that. But I would ask that they don’t let their cynicism of what we’re doing get in the way of something that is truly needed in society at this moment. The work we’re doing here at Duke is serving as a beacon for many other places.
I’m not going to convince everybody, and that’s okay. I want to spend my time working with those people who really want to affect change and do something meaningful.
Is there anything that I didn’t ask about that you want to share in this update?
Last week, we partnered with athletics and Liberty Mutual to have a sustainable women’s basketball game. Student athletes from across the university got together and got donations of used athletic equipment that are going to repurpose. The women’s basketball team wore recycled polycotton shirts that were made from waste products. In between quarters of the game we had a celebration of the work that’s gone on across the university. It’s just a really great example about how when we enlist the help of students—and believe me, this is student driven—we get so many great creative ideas about how we can all be more sustainable and lean into this climate commitment.
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Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at chase@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.