Smith College Professor, Student Study Campus Decarbonization

Before taking Smith College Associate Professor Alex Barron’s Intro to Environmental Policy course in the fall of her sophomore year, Emma Larsen ’27 had heard from her big sib about the work being done in his lab. When Barron emailed her class asking for a research assistant, Larsen jumped at the opportunity to apply.

“I was really excited to start doing work in environmental policy, and I thought the work he was doing was super cool,” Larsen recalls. “I remember just thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, please choose me.’”

Larsen’s work in Barron’s lab eventually led to contributing to a newly released publication focused on decarbonization on college and university campuses.

Titled “Decarbonization is Happening in U.S. Higher Education, but Carbon Neutrality Goals Alone are not Delivering it,” the white paper is co-authored by Barron and Larsen as well as former Smith students Greta Anesko ’25, Nubraz Kahn ’24, and Jenny Ding ’24, as well as collaborators at Hamilton College. The goal of the paper, which will be peer reviewed in the near future, is twofold: to see how colleges and universities have addressed decarbonization (the process of greatly reducing or altogether eliminating greenhouse gas emissions) on campus in the past few decades, and how they can do so more effectively in the future.

Though the goal of decarbonization is shared by many different entities, Barron, Larsen, and their team chose to focus on higher education for its unique capacity to drive long-term change.

“Higher education thinks on longer time scales,” Barron explains. "They often plan to be around for hundreds of years, so they’re better aligned to pursuing and implementing long-term solutions to the climate problem. A lot of experts on both climate science and climate solutions are also housed within academic institutions, and [in general], society still does look to higher education for a leadership role.”

In 2007, 800 institutions around the country pledged to take action on climate change by developing and implementing plans for carbon neutrality. By the time Barron first published research in 2021, approximately 352 had developed a plan and 11 had reached carbon neutrality. As Barron and his team began examining updated data more closely, they discovered a troubling trend: Most schools hadn’t reduced their direct emissions much at all; instead, the largest source of reductions (nearly two-thirds) came through offsets—paying another company somewhere else to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions instead.

“Basically, carbon neutrality commitments were treating a possibly poor-quality offset on the same level as replacing your campus heating system with a geothermal system,” Barron said during a presentation where he and Larsen shared their research with Smith’s chapter of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society, in late 2025. “I don’t think you have to be a climate policy expert to realize that schools achieving their climate goals by having other people reduce emissions for them is not a model that scales very well for national efforts.”

Larsen noted that the data underscored the problem.  “The median emissions reduction across all schools was only around 9%, and 37% of the schools reported higher emissions than when they started,” Larsen added.

At the same time, Larsen and Barron found a number of schools that had made deep reductions of 50% to almost 90%, demonstrating that action is possible. Smith College, along with nine other schools, is on track to significantly reduce emissions by 2030. Thanks to its historic geothermal energy project, Smith is expected to achieve an 80% reduction.  

The nonprofit Second Nature, which focuses on increasing climate action in higher education, plans to utilize some of the team’s work in revised decarbonization goals for schools.

“There’s been a lot of conversation about revising the incentives to reward schools for prioritizing decarbonization and other high-impact climate actions,” Barron explains.

In addition to collaborating on the paper, Barron and Larsen presented their findings at the 2025 Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) conference in Minneapolis. Their work was met with interest and enthusiasm, and being part of the conference is an experience Larsen describes as invaluable.

“It was my first conference ever, so I was definitely nervous,” she says. “But it was so interesting to hear the perspectives of other schools and how they were approaching sustainability. I had a great time.”

Because AASHE is a practitioner’s conference, Larsen and Barron were able to share their research directly with campus leaders charged with implementing change. “We don’t publish papers so that they just get read by other academics. We do our research with the explicit goal of informing and helping to shape practice, of putting it directly in the hands of practitioners,” Barron says. “We’re really hoping to do work that practitioners can use to further the case for climate action at their institutions.”