UVA's Decarbonization Academy began this week with a meet and greet breakfast. Over the course of the 8-week program, students will work with faculty and staff on various sustainability projects to advance UVA's sustainability goals.
Decarbonization Academy 2024 Kicks Off This Week
The Decarbonization Academy at UVA started this week with a meet and great breakfast with UVA undergraduates and graduate students, faculty members, and staff members. Over the 8-week program, students from various disciplines will work to advance UVA's sustainability goals by focusing on projects like designing on-Grounds forest patches, influencing social norms, and greening the university fleet.
The academy, led by Ethan Heil, program director and sustainability engineer at UVA’s Office for Sustainability, is designed to be an immersive learning experience for students who are interested in working towards UVA’s sustainability goals of being carbon-neutral by 2030 and fossil-fuel free by 2050. This year’s group of 16 fellow (third years, fourth years, and one graduate student) come from a variety of disciplines: engineering, environmental science, architecture, environmental thought and practice, and other majors.
Students spend 40 hours a week building on the prior years’ work, whether expanding the scope, delving into more analysis, or refining recommendations, and earn a $5,000 stipend. The academy culminates in August with student presentations and aims to significantly contribute to UVA's sustainability efforts.
Background on the Academy
Started in 2022, UVA’s Decarbonization Academy is a perfect example of what the university calls Grounds-engaged learning. It’s a living laboratory where student fellows co-create and complete a hands-on decarbonization project in five separate teams with a faculty or staff mentor. Weekly faculty lectures, site tours, and field work combine to make the academy a collaborative and holistic experience for the students.
Heil describes the academy as different from other summer internships or classes, “Every project will advance our decarbonization and sustainability efforts here at UVA. You can’t get more hands on than that.”
Mike Duffy, UVA's Transportation Operations and Fleet Manager, will be leading the green fleet team. Duffy says, “I’m excited because it’s an opportunity for students to contribute to significant emissions reductions, as well as transfer knowledge and experience to future engineers who will carry the technology forward.”
As leader of the forest patch team, Tim Beatley, the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities, sees the project as “a chance to blend academic research with a lot of hands-on activities.” As the team continues work from previous years, Beatley says, “I am excited to see both what this year’s forest team will come up with and how we can set a positive example and inspire other universities.”
Indeed, past projects have made a tangible impact at UVA and beyond. One team delved into carbon offsets which was given to the UVA carbon offsets taskforce (which became policy in 2023); another laid the groundwork for the U.S. Department of Energy decarbonization roadmap available online for other organizations, municipalities, and institutions; and the 2023 forest patch team led to the successful engagement of almost 100 student volunteers who planted the first forest patch in the fall of 2023.
Ryan Faddis, a rising fourth year studying Environmental Science and Environmental Thought and Practice said, “I’m very interested in nature-based solutions and thought this would be a great opportunity to put my interest to make a positive impact at UVA.” Ryan will join the Morven Sustainability Lab team.
Anika Gupta who will start working for the Office for Sustainability this fall, is looking forward to diving into the Forest Patch team. I heard about the academy from my friends. “They had only positive things to say about their experience; so I was excited to apply and join this summer!”
Looking Ahead
The academy will conclude on August 9 where students will present a final report, presentation, and poster. The students will also share their work with the broader community at the festive annual Gazpacho in the Garden hosted by the Morven Sustainability Lab. We look forward to seeing how each team will advance UVA’s sustainability goals this summer.
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Want to read more about each project? Below are brief excerpts of the 2024 Summer Decarbonization Academy faculty or professor mentor descriptions.
Project Description Excerpts
1- Tim Beatley, Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, will lead the Forest Patch team. They will complete the design and planting of the first five of these new forest patches on Grounds. The 2024 team will also work to explore and identify potential new sites for patches, beyond the initial five, as well as new areas for passive rewilding (or natural regeneration). The team may also continue to document and calculate the carbon sequestration and other benefits of the forest patches.
2- Leidy Klotz, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is leading a team on social norms. They will identify and attempt to influence social norms which are 1) visible on Grounds and 2) which enable or inhibit progress towards UVA’s Sustainability Goals. Such norms are powerful levers because they create feedback loops that lead to rapid change.
3- Led by Ethan Heil, Energy and Sustainability Engineer and Director of the Decarbonization Academy, will lead a team focused on UVA buildings. With a portfolio of over 500 buildings and new ones constantly in the pipeline, a holistic strategy for decarbonizing the University’s buildings will be essential in achieving carbon neutrality. The building decarbonization team will focus on strategies to reduce carbon emissions in buildings through energy efficiency, green building, and the removal of fossil fuels from existing buildings.
4- Mike Duffy, Transportation Operations and Fleet Manager, will lead the transportation cohort. The university fleet of over 300 vehicles is a highly visible example of the University's use of fossil fuels. The fleet decarbonization team will work to continue decarbonizing UVA’s award-winning green fleet. Fellows will work as a team to evaluate and expand opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of UVA's vehicle fleet through strategies including electrification, telematics, route optimization, and other innovative ideas.
5- The final project is co-led by Professor Manuel Lerdau, Professor of Environmental Sciences and Biology, and Professor Beth Meyer, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Faculty Director of Morven Sustainability Lab (MSL). Since agricultural practices and forest conversation have a big impact on decarbonization, MSL is keen to record, monitor, measure and analyze the impact of our transition from a traditional non-sustainable farm of monoculture crops and large stands of clear-cut timbering to a model of conservation and regenerative agro-forestry.
This team will involve field work and research at Morven as well as case study comparison, data set identification, and digital data access design. Students will examine the possible data infrastructures we might join from the NSF’s National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) to a proposed UVA field station network (Mountain Lake Biological Station, Blandy Farm Experimental Farm, and the Eastern Shore Long Term Ecological Research Station).
This research will build on the century of data collected at Morven in leather-bound farm journals (1930-2024). We are hopeful that our future environmental database will serve scholarly work in the Arts and Humanities as well as Sciences, underscoring the pan-university perspective necessary to imagine an alternative climate-adaptive and responsive future where humans and the planet can thrive and flourish.