Harvard Faculty Divest: It’s Time the University Addresses the Climate Crisis

It’s no secret that climate change is destroying our planet, and Harvard has a responsibility to act — the University admitted that much in 2021 when they agreed to phase out fossil fuel investments.

But as Hurricanes Helene and Milton have just reminded us, climate change is getting worse, and yet Harvard is still not doing its utmost to address this urgent crisis.

In 2023, we experienced the hottest year ever recorded. This year, we’re on track to break that record. It is now almost certain that global average temperatures will rise by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference’s original target.

Extreme weather events and fossil fuel pollution are already killing millions of people each year — and by 2050, some experts estimate, there may be more than 1.2 billion climate refugees.

Economists warn that climate change will severely curtail economic growth, with a possible reduction of 12 percent of global GDP for every one-degree rise in the Earth’s mean surface temperature. And yet it’s projected that the United States will produce more oil and gas in 2030 than it is producing in 2024.

Questions of accountability and energy consumption logically follow. On the university level, is Harvard doing enough to address the impending emergency?

Sadly, not yet. If anything, institutions of higher education have been particularly reluctant to address the crisis and are sometimes complicit in ignoring its major cause: the consumption of fossil fuels.

Last month, student activists released a report identifying fossil-fuel funding at six major research universities in the United States. Despite the obvious enormity of climate change, its main driver supplies an often covert source for academic research and programming, always with the effect of silencing discussion about decarbonization.

Four years ago, Harvard did the right thing by divesting its finances from fossil fuel interests and committing to meaningful decarbonization of the University endowment. Since then, the University has committed to wider and deeper research related to the climate crisis.

Still, leadership needs to be stronger.

Five years ago, we — Harvard Faculty Divest — wrote and circulated a white paper naming “four critical dimensions” needed for Harvard’s real decarbonization: leading by example, research, teaching, and stimulating public discussion.

The report offered dozens of examples of how to fill out these dimensions, everything from phasing out single-use plastics, reducing the presence of meat in campus catering, coming up with a plan to be fossil-fuel-free by 2035, ensuring enough courses on climate for each undergrad to take one, and providing resources to scientists who are fighting disinformation.

Bigger steps — such as making the University free of fossil-fuels by 2035, including a centralized carbon accounting for the institution (a blueprint for others to follow) — come next.

While Harvard has begun to address the climate crisis through their Office for Sustainability and the new Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability (with the latter’s Committee on Climate Education releasing an important and ambitious 2022 report), we still urge much faster action, especially in the areas of education, public outreach, and leading by example. In each case, we would make even stronger recommendations than appeared in our white paper in 2019.

We would now urge the college to require each undergraduate to take a course on climate, as Arizona State University does. And we would recommend that Harvard offer all newly admitted students — from freshmen to students in professional, doctoral, and executive education programs — an introductory event on climate change.

Finally, we restate our recommendation that there be serious carbon accounting throughout the University (including disclosure of any connections to fossil fuel interests), creating a system visible within and beyond the institution, to show how decarbonization can be accomplished, leading by example.

In this crisis, speed is critical — but so too is an intergenerational alliance, in which faculty must advocate for and assist the younger people they educate.

We, therefore, call on Harvard’s administration to produce additional, meaningful action — by next semester — to address climate change, to signal genuine leadership on this issue, and to create a foundation for continuing action.

We have no time to lose.

Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History and is a co-chair of Harvard Faculty Divest. Richard D. Parker is a lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School, a senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, and a co-chair of Harvard Faculty Divest. Caren G. Solomon is an associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is a member of the steering committee of Harvard Faculty Divest.