Chapter 2. The University as a Living Laboratory for Climate Solutions

The story of the University of California’s institutional goal of de-carbonization by 2025, already years in the making, was a key feature of a systemwide Summit on carbon neutrality and climate mitigation in the Fall of 2015. This report, commissioned by the Summit, represents a unique multi-campus, interdisciplinary collaboration, an attempt by one university system to harness its diverse intellectual resources to address the crisis of global climate disruption. This chapter puts the Bending the Curve report into the context of the University of California’s (UC) carbon neutrality and sustainability initiatives and offers one example of how a large organization can become a “living laboratory”— a research, teaching and learning, and innovation testbed—for climate solutions.