The Sustainable Endowments Institute released the 4th edition of its annual College Sustainability Report Card 2010, also known as the Green Report Card on Wednesday.

Founded in 2005 and supported by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the Institute supports the advancement of sustainability in higher education. It boasts that its college ranking project had a response rate of 96 percent in 2009, giving the Green Report Card the highest response rate of any college sustainability ranking or rating service.

The Green Report Card graded 332 universities on a scale of 1 through 4 on their performance in nine categories:

• Administration
• Climate Change & Energy
• Food & Recycling
• Green Building
• Transportation
• Student Involvement
• Endowment Transparency
• Shareholder Engagement
• Investment Priorities

Twenty-six schools received a 4.0:

• Amherst College
• Arizona State University
• Brown University
• University of California – San Diego
• Carleton College
• College of the Atlantic
• University of Colorado
• Dickinson College
• Harvard University
• Luther College
• Macalester College
• Middlebury College
• University of Minnesota
• University of New Hampshire
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Oberlin College
• Pacific Lutheran University
• University of Pennsylvania
• Pomona College
• Smith College
• Stanford University
• University of Vermont
• University of Washington
• Wesleyan University
• Williams College
• Yale University

Out of the 26 schools that earned a 4.0, 20 belong to the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC).

“We believe that report cards like this offer important opportunities to raise public awareness and apply pressure to schools to improve their sustainability efforts.  However, there are other useful considerations too, such as membership in the ACUPCC, whether the school is working towards climate neutrality, and what sustainability courses and research the school is providing,” stated Gina Coplon-Newfield, director of communications and outreach for Second Nature.

The total endowment value of the schools surveyed for this year’s Green Report Card is $325 billion. While the average endowment value dropped 23 percent in the last year, schools are not making cuts in sustainability. In fact, they are using sustainability to their advantage.

“Surprising the skeptics, most schools we surveyed did not let financial reversals undermine their green commitments,” said Mark Orlowski, executive director of the Sustainable Endowments Institute, in a statement. “New financial realities encouraged saving money by adopting environmentally friendly innovations.”

“Colleges are now taking pride in greener campuses and sustainability-savvy investments—increasingly important concerns for parents and students in choosing a school,” Orlowski said.

The Green Report Card allows a person to compare up to 10 schools at a time, filtered by more than 100 categories, such as geographic region, athletic league, environmental studies majors, sustainability jobs on campus, renewable energy use and many other factors.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

First, there was the nagging problem of all that fish habitat-destroying fertilizer being dumped on those super-size corn fields. Then came concerns that growing corn (or soybeans or sugar cane) for fuel was displacing farmland needed for food. Now, the ultimate question – Does it work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? – has been raised, and the answer isn’t what we wanted to hear.

Bio fuel crops actually increase carbon emissions, according to two studies published Thursday in the journal Science. The gist: Clearing grassland and forests to grow crops releases more carbon into the air than is saved by burning biofuels instead of gasoline. In fact, it could take more than 150 years of growing biofuel crops to get to net zero carbon emissions. Furthermore, the whole shift toward growing crops for fuel instead is pushing food production into developing nations, where rain forests and other carbon sink areas are being cleared for soy bean farms — and increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

The ethanol industry has maintained that ethanol production saves about 20 percent in greenhouse emissions. But the scientists’ model in one of the new studies showed that it could take hundreds of years before realizing any carbon emissions savings because of these global land-use changes.

“It’s a little frightening to think that something this well intentioned might be very damaging,” study co-author Jason Hill, an economist and ecologist at the University of Minnesota, told the LA Times.

Growing something other than corn may not work either, according to the researchers who warned that converting any “productive land” to biofuel production would produce more greenhouse gases than it would save. A collaboration of scientists from Princeton and Georgetown Universities and various agricultural think tanks did one study; the other was sponsored by the University of Minnesota and the Nature Conservancy.

The scientists urged policy makers to look at trash, crop waste and prairie grasses as better potential sources for fuel.

For more on this study, see the abstract at Science magazine or the University of Minnesota news report.