Note: This letter originally appeared as an email sent to the Hopkins community on November 22, 2021.
Dear Johns Hopkins Community:
As President Daniels, Provost Kumar, and Senior Vice President Heller shared in an email last week, JHU is creating a new plan to combat the climate crisis and advance our university’s sustainability goals. This work will build on the foundation laid over the past decade and will articulate our collective vision for a healthy, equitable, and sustainable future.
Feedback and ideas from the university community will form the basis of this important work. You have a vital role to play in identifying new opportunities for systemic approaches to sustainability across our academic and operational endeavors.
We invite you to start by completing a survey that will solicit feedback from the JHU community to help establish the new sustainability plan’s vision and guiding principles in spring ’22. Those principles will summarize the themes and priorities most important to the JHU community and will serve as the pillars of the plan’s foundation. Responses to the survey are due by Sunday, Dec. 12. and we ask you to share widely.
We will also be discussing the sustainability plan and our institution’s next steps in a town hall meeting from 1 to 2:15 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 2. We encourage you to join us and to submit questions before or during the event. Registration is required in order to participate.
During the town hall, Provost Kumar and Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration Laurent Heller will talk more about the process and how JHU community members can be involved. Additionally, we will hear from guest speaker and JHU alumnus Jonathan Patz. Dr. Patz was a former lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and was part of the IPCC team that received the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore in 2007. He is currently the director of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Global Health Institute and has been a thought leader in environmental health for decades.
We hope you will join us and be a part of the effort to harness the intellect, creativity, and ambition of the JHU community in addressing the climate emergency, as well as sustainability challenges impacting our local communities.
Sincerely,
Sustainability Plan Steering Committee Co-chairs
Julian Goresko
Director of Sustainability
Megan Latshaw
Associate Scientist in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Ben Zaitchik
Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Krieger School of Arts and Sciences