Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
Climate change is affecting every country in the world. In 2018, over 39 million people worldwide were affected by changing weather patterns, rising sea levels, and more extreme weather events. If left unchecked, climate change will cause aver- age global temperatures to increase beyond 3°C, and will adversely affect every ecosystem. Today we can take actions that will lead to more jobs, great prosperity, and better lives for all while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and building climate resilience.
Infographic and Overview Why It Matters Things To Do The Five Targets
Sustainable Development Goal #13 is all about looking closely at how climate change is affecting the world and taking swift action to mitigate and adapt to combat it. At the University of Minnesota, research on climate change and its impact is conducted systemwide and looks at everything from how we can adapt to mitigate the potential effects of climate change by developing more climate resilient plants and crops, to designing buildings that can better withstand extreme weather, to how we can change University policies and systems to limit our impact on the environment, to sharing with the public how climate change affects them and training future climate warriors who will advocate for needed changes and partnerships well into the future.
RESEARCH AND EXPERTISE
OUTREACH AND PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
Local education programs
The Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership (MCAP) advances critical climate science, champions adaptation leadership and supports climate resilience actions and collaborations across sectors and levels of government to ensure Minnesota is making needed progress to prepare for our changing climate. In recent years, their work has included training and peer learning in relation to climate communication, education and action across Greater MN as identified by UN SDG 13.
Modeling Integrated Energy Communities for the 21st Century in Minnesota and Germany is pairing Minnesota municipalities with award-winning climate-smart communities in Germany to accelerate progress toward a cleaner and more efficient energy footprint. In 2016, five communities in Minnesota were chosen to participate.
The Clean Energy Resource Teams (CERTs) are a partnership among the University of Minnesota, the MN Department of Commerce, Southwest Regional Development Commission and Great Plains Institute with a shared mission to help individuals and their communities identify and implement community-based clean energy projects.
Environmental education collaboration with non-profits
The Forest Assisted Migration Project is a partnership with UMN and the Nature Conservancy to support the retention of climate adapted Northern boreal forests in Minnesota. The project was featured as part of the Dear MN outreach campaign in 2023 and has been covered extensively in the media (2023 MPR Story).
The Forever Green Partnership is a multi-sector partnership working to advance year-round productive living cover or "Continuous Living Cover" on farmland. The Partnership has received extensive news coverage and unites members from private, public, and advocacy sectors around a common interest in increasing "Continuous Living Cover" in agriculture to capitalize on its many economic and environmental benefits.
Cooperative planning for climate change disasters
The new Minnesota Climate Action Framework sets a vision for how Minnesota will address and prepare for climate change. The Framework identifies immediate, near-term actions to help achieve the long-term goal of a carbon-neutral, resilient, and equitable future. In partnership with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, the MCAP team is working to develop climate resilience metrics to help monitor and assess the success of priority actions outlined in the Resilient Communities section of the Framework.
Wabasha County Emergency Management is working with U-Spatial at the University of Minnesota Duluth to update the county’s Hazard Mitigation Plan (HMP). The plan assesses the natural hazards that pose risk to the county, such as tornadoes, straight line winds, ice storms, blizzards, wildfire, flooding, and extreme temperatures and identifies ways to minimize the damage of future events. As the county works to update the plan, it wants to hear from the public.
Learn More and Provide Feedback
In collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) National Wildlife Refuge System (NWRS), MCAP is helping natural resource managers integrate refuge management objectives and available climate science to consider and assess a range of management alternatives.
Water in Minnesota is a critical cultural and natural resource, vital to our state’s recreation and tourism, industry, agriculture, and Indigenous culture and lifeways. MCAP is participating in a project focused on producing information about interactions between Minnesota’s changing climate and groundwater recharge, evapotranspiration, runoff, and crop water demand.
Chief Sustainability Officer, Shane Stennes, participated as a Steering Committee member for the 2023 City of Minneapolis Climate Equity Plan.
Inform and support government
The Morris Model is a community-wide UMN-public-private partnership to make Morris a model community for sustainable practices informed by the co-developed strategic and resilience plans. The resiliency series was used to help inform City and County government officials on expected climate impacts and vulnerabilities.
The Climate Explorer Tool provides government officials and policy makers the ability to visualize climate change risk. It allows the exploration of temperature, precipitation, and drought severity data (historical and projected) for the entire state of Minnesota or for a chosen sub-region.
In 2023, the University of Minnesota received a five year grant from the EPA and DOE to lead a multi-state effort to help rural, tribal, and underserved communities access federal funding for energy and environmental improvement efforts. The Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers (TCTACs) represent an innovative new approach to federal grant outreach with a focus on increasing participation and success rates of underserved communities.
MCAP is involved with a collaborative project that seeks to bring together a range of expertise and perspectives to assess and evaluate progress toward climate resilience across the 1854 Ceded Territory and to use this knowledge to co-develop an updated adaptation plan for the 1854 Treaty Authority and the Bois Forte, Grand Portage, and Fond du Lac Bands that incorporates different knowledge (e.g. climate data and tribal observations and stories) and fosters relationships required to develop knowledge and resources that are both useful and used.
Public events and engagement related to climate action
MCAP, in collaboration with regional and national partners, built on past conference success and expanded efforts to host a broader Midwest Climate Resilience Conference in Duluth. The 2023 Midwest Climate Resilience Conference brought together representatives from the public, private and nonprofit sectors to inspire and enable climate adaptation in communities throughout Minnesota.
UMD's Climate Change Conference: Our Climate Futures: Equity & Inclusion at the Center was a two-day conference hosted in 2023 by the Office of Sustainability and the Institute on the Environment. The goal of the conference was to initiate conversations between the keynote speaker, August Ball (Cream City Conservation), UMD faculty, students, and Duluth community members to identify and discuss solutions to the adverse social, economic, public health, and environmental issues related to climate change.
In partnership with HGA, MCAP launched a multi-faceted, comprehensive effort to characterize the climate information needs of architecture and engineering (A&E) professionals, challenges they encounter accessing, understanding, and applying this information, and opportunities to advance climate resiliency actions and services provisioned by the A&E sector.
Research breakthroughs and discoveries related to climate action
To better understand future climate risks, we need future climate models. Minnesota CliMAT is an interactive online tool that provides highly localized climate projections for Minnesota. Users can view climate projections down to the 4km/2.6mile scale across the state, visualizing even how specific towns will likely be impacted in the coming decades.
In 2020, in partnership with the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, Midwest CASC completed a four-part process to identify climate science priorities for both the Northeast and Midwest regions. The results of this work will ensure that Midwest CASC research priorities are informed by current scientific understanding, technical feasibility, and opportunity for impact – and that they capture the full range of relevant issues and are attentive to emerging concerns.
Researchers at the new AI Institute for Climate-Land Interactions, Mitigation, Adaptation, Tradeoffs and Economy (AI-CLIMATE) aim to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to create more climate-smart practices that will absorb and store carbon while simultaneously boosting the economy in the agriculture and forestry industries.
The University of Minnesota is one of only a few select institutions awarded two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs).
- The Center for Interacting Geo-Processes in Mineral Carbon Storage brings together engineers and scientists from five internationally renowned organizations to study and improve the process of carbon mineralization, a promising means of permanently storing carbon dioxide in geologic formations.
- Researchers at the Center for Programmable Energy Catalysis focus on transforming how catalysts convert energy-rich molecules in chemical reactions, ultimately leading to enhancements in rate, selectivity and conversion of those reactions.
EDUCATION AND STUDENTS
UMN POLICIES AND ADMINISTRATION
Low-carbon energy use
The University of Minnesota tracks energy use across the system campuses in order to identify how much energy is used, from which sources, and to continue improving energy saving efforts.
Explore the Numbers for Energy Use in 2022 and 2021
In 2021 the Twin Cities campus achieved over 8 million kilowatt hours in electricity savings which is enough electricity to power 880 average homes for a year and avoid 5 million pounds of CO2 emissions. In 2021 UMTC also purchased 60 million kilowatt hours of renewable electricity. That's equal to the average electrical use of around 6,000 average Minnesota homes. It's 28% of the total electricity purchased for campus and 16% of total electricity consumed.
In summer 2020 a group of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics researchers and staff connected with the Office of Sustainability to work to create a more environmentally sustainable lab space at the University.
Learn More About the Green Labs Program
In 2019, UMN Morris ranked #1 in the U.S. for most renewable electricity generated on campus per full-time equivalent (FTE) student by Environment America. On average, about 70% of electricity used on campus daily is generated by renewables. Annually they produce more electricity than they need through a combination of wind turbines, biomass gasification facility, and solar arrays.
Electricity and energy use account for 90% of UMD’s greenhouse gas emissions making energy both an environmental and economic concern. Reducing energy use is a top priority in making the Duluth campus more sustainable.
Learn More about UMD's Energy Action Plan
The UMD Green Revolving Fund was established in 2011 to invest in sustainable projects at UMD. Projects are intended to contribute to efforts to save energy and become a more sustainable campus, along with providing long-term financial savings to the University of Minnesota. Savings and rebates are paid back into the fund, building equity, and helping to fund future projects.
The University of Minnesota TC, Rochester, Crookston and Duluth campuses are signatories on the Second Nature Carbon Commitment and the Morris campus is a signatory on the Second Nature Climate Commitment. Both commitments require the development of carbon neutral targets for Scopes 1 and 2, and Scope 3 air travel and commuting. Collectively, the University has established a target date of 2050 for carbon neutrality across these scopes. Individual campuses may have earlier dates.
University Climate Action Plans for Carbon Neutrality and Resilience
In 2023 the University of Minnesota Twin Cities published an updated climate action plan to affirm and advance the institution’s participation in the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment. The plan laid out aspirational goals and broad strategies for reducing, and ultimately eliminating, the campus’ net greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century.
In 2023 the University of Minnesota Duluth developed a Climate Action Plan with the goal of visioning the next 10 years of climate action, campus investment & development, and ensuring the capacity to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.
The Morris Model is a partnership for progress made up of numerous groups from across the Morris community focused on five key areas: energy conservation, clean energy, community resilience, cultural exchange, and celebration. Within their strategic plan, they have identified specific goals related to clean and efficient energy, transportation, waste reduction and recycling, and education.
Guided by the priorities and goals of MPact 2025, the University’s first Systemwide Strategic Plan, the University of Minnesota is developing a Campus and Climate Action Plan for each of the Duluth, Rochester, Crookston and Morris campuses. The result will be a deeply integrated, seamless set of plans that unites the common themes and recommendations that will provide a framework for the next 30 years in terms of physical plans and climate action strategies.
Learn More and Provide Feedback