In a message to the community on Earth Day, President Sian Leah Beilock announced the launch of the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative, a comprehensive commitment to meaningfully address renewal and sustainability on campus and beyond and related research opportunities. 

The plan calls for investments of more than $500 million in the next five years to accelerate infrastructure renewal and deferred maintenance that will keep Dartmouth’s campus functioning efficiently year-round. Part of the effort involves Dartmouth faculty studying the construction projects and producing research on subsurface conditions and the efficacy of technologies being deployed.

“Our aging infrastructure—some of which is more than 100 years old—is in dire need of repair, and rather than sinking resources into an outdated system, we will take this opportunity to reduce our carbon footprint in a lasting way,” President Beilock says.

Major upgrades around campus will include improvements to energy efficiency, the continued transition from steam to hot water heating, and the installation of geo-exchange borefields and high-capacity heat pumps.

The program will enable the expansion of new housing units on campus through projects that prioritize efficiency and resiliency measures.

“A focus on efficiency makes good business sense by lowering our exposure to expensive energy sources like oil and electricity used to heat and cool our campus,” says Josh Keniston, senior vice president for operations. “Resiliency is also important, ensuring that we have multiple energy sources on campus that provide backup and redundancy to meet high operational demands of cutting-edge research that enables discovery.”

The work will be funded by a combination of philanthropy, endowment draws, and central reserves.

The Climate Collaborative will not stop at addressing campus infrastructure and will benefit from faculty expertise across campus, including the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society. 

“As a leading research university, our responsibility to address climate change goes far beyond the carbon footprint on campus,” Beilock says. “As we embark on the largest operational change in Dartmouth’s history, our campus will become a living lab as our capital projects become drivers of new research, teaching, and collaboration. Critical to this will be our students, whose passion and creativity have helped spur our aggressive push around campus decarbonization.”

As a result of this comprehensive effort, Dartmouth expects to meet new targets for reducing carbon emissions on campus by 60% by 2030 and 100% by 2050 in a fiscally responsible way. This will require new innovation to achieve our 100% goal by 2050, as currently available technologies do not offer the reliability or are financially not feasible to get us all the way to 100%.

Several efforts toward the collaborative’s educational goals are already underway, including the recently announced Climate Futures Initiative—which Beilock describes as a year-long program to “help ensure we capitalize on areas where Dartmouth is best positioned to drive climate scholarship and solutions”—and the Greenshot Accelerator, a partnership of the Irving Institute, Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship, Tuck School of Business, and Thayer School of Engineering that is supporting entrepreneurs interested in climate efficiency and resiliency.

The Dartmouth Climate Collaborative will have an advisory council that includes faculty, students, alumni, and a representative from the Sustainable Hanover community group. The council will be co-chaired by Professor of Anthropology Laura Ogden, who is serving as the special advisor to the provost on climate and sustainability, and Rosi Kerr ’97, director of the Sustainability Office.

The advisory council will report to Provost David Kotz ’86 and Keniston, the senior vice president for operations.

The community is gathering on Tuesday, April 23, at Collis Common Ground for a Celebrating Dartmouth’s Climate Commitment event, where several faculty, senior leaders, and students will share why they’re excited about the future of climate action and study at Dartmouth. A livestream will be available.

“As the effects of climate change become more and more pronounced, Dartmouth must meet the moment. Maintaining the status quo is not an option, nor is incremental change. The time for bold action is now,” Beilock says.

Editor’s note: This story was edited on April 7, 2025, to clarify the nature of infrastructure investments and academic involvement in the process.