The Pennsylvania Consortium for Interdisciplinary Environmental Policy has received a grant from the Sustainable Energy Fund of Central and Eastern Pennsylvania to support the development of greenhouse gas inventories and reduction strategies in higher education in Pennsylvania schools.

The grant program, to be administered by Wilson College, will provide software and training that has been specifically designed for higher education to do greenhouse gas inventories and reduction strategies.

So far, five schools have expressed interest in participating. Currently, there are about 100 schools in the U.S. participating in a similar program.

The goal of the PCIEP program will be to get 10 schools in Pennsylvania signed up in the first year with a goal of getting all 56 PCIEP schools working on this within three years. The first training session on the software has been scheduled for May 19 at Penn State.

This program will allow higher education to: use the campus as a laboratory to teach students about where the GHG come from and the challenges in reducing GHG emissions; share experiences with what works to reduce GHG emissions at other schools, harness the intellectual power in higher education to figure out what works Some schools in other parts of the US have developed very innovative strategies to reduce energy demand and GHG emissions.

For more information, contact DEP's Donald Brown, PCIEP director, at 717-783-8504 or send email to brownd@state.pa.us .

4/21/2006