Summary

We are Yale alumni, and members of Yale Blue Green (YBG), the shared interest group for Yalies interested in environment and sustainability.

We invite alumni and the broader Yale community to join us in strongly encouraging Yale to expand and strengthen its commitment to leadership in sustainability, which is a globally applicable decision-making framework balancing people, planet and prosperity.

Yale has an undisputed reputation for educating the next generations of leaders. Those future leaders will have to address today’s global crises such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and economic inequality, and their overarching discipline, sustainability.

We support Yale’s existing commitments to sustainability, including the actions under the Yale Sustainability Plan. We applaud the wonderful September announcements on the Task Force to look at the timing of the Net Zero Carbon Goal.

We plan to meet with President Salovey and Scott Strobel, the new provost, to ask Yale to form an additional task group to explore a strategy for how Yale can look beyond the Carbon Goal and existing 38 goals in the 2025 sustainability plan, to think more broadly about sustainability especially interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching, and to achieve leadership in sustainability with an aggressive timetable. This effort needs to reach across disciplines and examine options with a goal of making sustainability a focus of its intellectual and cultural leadership.

As a globally renowned research institution, we assert that Yale has the opportunity, and an urgent imperative to take a stand, lead, and change the world. Alumni stand ready to help in this effort.