Yale Blue Green, an alumni shared interest group, helped Yale Planetary Solutions produce a packed week of programming at the massive annual climate event.
When Yale Planetary Solutions hosted a series of special events and programming during Climate Week NYC last month, some big names participated: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse ’78, former U.S. Secretary of State and Presidential Climate Envoy John Kerry ’66, climate investor Tom Steyer ’79, and Yale Blue Green.
Yale Blue Green, an alumni shared interest group formed in 2011, is expanding its reach and stepping up its efforts to support the university’s sustainability work, including Yale Planetary Solutions, which seeks to catalyze the Yale community to accelerate progress on climate and environmental challenges around the world.
During Climate Week NYC, Yale Planetary Solutions hosted four days of programming on topics ranging from climate leadership and investments to natural carbon capture and climate justice. Yale Blue Green sponsored two-panel discussions. The first, Piercing the Fog of Misinformation: Communicating the Case for Climate Action, was organized by Yale Blue Green board member Robert Smith ’75.
The second, Emerging Perspectives on Ocean Futures, was organized by Meriwether Wilson ’84, who also participated as a panelist. Wilson is a reader in marine science and policy at the University of Edinburgh who has worked on coastal-marine governance and conservation for decades.
For Wilson, who remembers the energy and momentum around the earliest U.S. environmental and species management legislation in the 1970s, Yale’s commitment to the issues is a full-circle moment.
“A lot of the policies born in the 1970s were over the years forgotten, in terms of the movement that went into making them,” she says. “But now there’s a movement again. For me, it’s déjà vu. But for others, it’s a really powerful time of activism around sustainability.”
Yale Blue Green has long been involved in sustainability efforts at Yale and within the alumni community, including through helping organize the Yale Environmental Sustainability Summits held in 2015, 2017, and 2019. The group has chapters in several cities and is focused on creating virtual chapters for classes or topic areas. The Class of 1994 has created a chapter, and Wilson is helping organize one for people who do ocean-related work. Among other efforts, Yale Blue Green fundraises for a Sustainability Fund that provides money to students working on research through the Yale Office of Sustainability.
In 2019, the group organized the Sustainability Initiative, which urged alumni and the broader Yale community to join it in “strongly encouraging Yale” to increase its commitment to sustainability. The initiative gathered nearly 500 signatures from alumni dating back to the Class of 1960 and from every graduate and professional school.
“Our role is helping support the university by working with our huge alumni network who are in sustainability fields,” says Becky Bunnell ’78, who co-chairs the Yale Blue Green alumni board with Chip Spear ’74. “We want to see what issues they are facing in their work or volunteer efforts and connect them with professors and graduate students who might be working on similar things—in other words, can we connect leading-edge academic research to real-world opportunities that allow us to tackle large climate related issues?”
Bunnell says participating in Climate Week NYC was a way to “bring all the brain power of Yale and have it be connected with sustainability work going on globally.”
“We’re hopeful that this is something we can continue each year,” she says.
Sara Smiley Smith ’07 MPH, MESc, ’10 PhD, Yale’s assistant provost for Planetary Solutions, says Yale Blue Green is a “great partner in harnessing the enthusiasm of our fantastic alumni community.”
“Connecting with passionate alumni will help us to accelerate the work of our broad network to take action and have a measurable impact on our global climate and sustainability crises,” she says.
