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Each year students celebrate Earth Day by cleaning up locations around the Newport, R.I. area.
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Salve Regina Students Attend Northern Forest Alliance Climate Change Conference
In November 2008, Colleen Danaher '09, Edwin Murenzi Mutanguha '11, Karissa White '11 and Samuel Young '11 attended the Northern Forest Alliance Climate Change Conference at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. This conference was held to address the impact of global warming on the Northern Forest, a largely forested, rural region of northern New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
Numerous schools located within the Northern Forest region attended this conference, including Saint Lawrence University, the College of the Atlantic, the University of Vermont and Ithaca College, as well as a few from outside the region, including the University of Rhode Island. The goals of this conference were to connect students from schools within the Northern Forest region, teach students about the effects of global warming on the region, and have students come up with ways that their universities can take leadership roles in reducing the impacts of global warming.
The students attended this conference as members of Salve Regina's Environmental Club. Their goals were to learn what other schools are doing in their work toward sustainability, compare their efforts to those of the other schools, develop plans to take back to the Environmental Club and the Salve Regina community, learn more about environmental issues and the Northern Forest region, and to contribute to the goals of the Northern Forest Alliance.
The students have come up with specific goals that they hope to implement at Salve Regina, such as reducing the carbon emissions that comprise our primary contribution to global warming. This goal can be attained in many ways, all of which involve changing some aspect of our everyday lifestyles. Such changes include reducing greenhouse gas emissions through taking shorter showers, carpooling or finding alternate forms of transportation, and turning off lights and unplugging electronics when they are not in use.
The students feel that as an institution, Salve Regina needs to calculate its total carbon emissions, and begin to reduce those emissions by reducing heat loss in its buildings, implementing more dimmers and photosensitive compact fluorescent bulbs, and reducing solid waste on campus that must be hauled away. These changes are already in place at many of campuses the students learned about, and they are crucial in making Salve Regina sustainable. Achieving sustainability will lower the university's environmental impact, including its contribution to global warming.
