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A New Year Message
Dear friends and supporters:
Here at Clean Air-Cool Planet we are looking forward to 2013. We’ve focused our programs so that we can concentrate our efforts on our thriving national campus climate solutions programs and on our Northeast regional climate impacts and adaptation work.
We’ll remember 2012 as the year that Superstorm Irene showed us all how close to home the effects of climate change can be–and just how unprepared most communities in the U.S. are for such impacts. Our projects with the New Hampshire Coastal Adaptation Working Group (NHCAW) and with the City of Bridgeport have been helping to develop approaches to increase resilience at the local level–approaches that we think can provide models for communities throughout the Northeast and across the nation.
Also in 2012 we completed a comprehensive assessment of the impacts and lessons learned from ten of our biggest community-based programs undertaken over the last six years: From helping draft Pittsburgh’s first Climate Action Plan to spearheading the creation of the Local Energy Committee movement in New Hampshire; and from producing state-of-the-art sea level rise maps for cities along the East coast to operating a micro-grants program to support grassroots community organizations. We were able to document real and lasting impacts from Clean Air-Cool Planet’s involvement in more than 150 communities and to draw a series of conclusions that we think will help community leaders, non-profits like ours, and funders alike sharpen and strengthen their approaches to climate action. One of the biggest lessons learned for us was the importance of going deep and staying involved over the long term. In 2013, we’ll build from that conclusion to strengthen and further our work in the communities of the Piscataqua watershed of New Hampshire and in Connecticut’s coastal Fairfield County.
Last year our campus sustainability program went from strength to strength. A major milestone was reached in October when we launched the new online version of our Campus Carbon Calculator™ in beta. Nearly 50 colleges and universities are currently testing it, and in January 2013 it will go live for every campus in the country. More than 90% of the college and university campuses that publicly report their greenhouse gas emissions do so using our Calculator. In 2013 we’ll be expanding the capabilities of this remarkable sustainability tool and adding new modules that will help accelerate the current revolution in campus sustainability.
There was sad news too in 2012. In early September we heard that one of the co-founders of Clean Air-Cool Planet, Ted Smith had lost his life in a tragic hiking accident in his beloved Montana. Ted was instrumental in creating the vision for Clean Air-Cool Planet and in helping to steer us through our first decade and he was a true climate and conservation leader, to whom many activists, including myself, owe much for the mentoring and sage advice he gave them.
Clean Air-Cool Planet is honoring Ted’s memory through the creation of the Ted Smith Fund for the Next Generation of Environmental Leaders. Our goal is to raise $500,000 for the Ted Smith Fund to enable us to double the number of Clean Air-Cool Planet Summer Climate Fellows we can support during the next five years, and we’ll be telling you more about this exciting initiative early in the New Year. Our Climate Fellows program has become one of our biggest successes, with nearly 50 Fellows undertaking challenging and impactful projects during its first five years. Some of our best work is done each year with the help of our Fellows and with the partner organizations and communities that host them. We know that Ted, who helped to start our Fellows program, would like nothing better than to see the program grow, and with your continued support, that’s exactly what we plan to make happen in 2013.
To all of our friends and supporters, I’d like to extend our warm wishes for a very happy 2013. Please be on the lookout over the next several weeks for more information about all of the initiatives I’ve touched upon in this letter, as well as a redesigned website that we hope will showcase our successes and highlight our most popular resources.
Yours truly,
Adam Markham
President, Clean Air-Cool Planet
Filed under: Climate Change Tagged: adaptation, bridgeport, Campus Carbon Calculator, Campus Climate Action, climate fellows, NHCAW, preparedness, Ted Smith Fund 
2013-01-02 07:46:36
Source: http://coolplanet.org/2013/01/02/a-new-year-message/
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