CRed - The Community Carbon Reduction Project at UNC-Chapel Hill

The Institute for the Environment has made the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by this campus, the local community, the State of North Carolina and the United States a core aspect of our education, research and outreach activities. As one step, we have joined the Community Carbon Reduction (CRed) program begun at the University of East Anglia in England, serving as the first such partner site in the United States. We invite other campuses and communities throughout the nation to join, and have created this web site to serve as a resource base for efforts here and elsewhere. We are eager to help you join us in reducing carbon dioxide emissions through a mixture of policy options, community designs and personal action.

CRed was inspired by the U.K. Government's new energy policy, summarized in the Energy White Paper – Our Energy Future. That policy sets an ambitious goal of 60% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050; see the Modeling page for the basis of this 60% goal. In the U.K., about 9 tons of carbon dioxide is released per person each year, an equivalent of 5 hot air balloons. In order to reduce by 60%, each person needs to lose 3 of these hot air balloons. The current release rate in North Carolina and the U.S. is closer to 8 hot air balloons per person per year, requiring a loss of 5 of these to meet the CRed goal of a 60% reduction. If adopted by all developed countries, this reduction would lead to what is believed to be at the upper end of a sustainable level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which was taken by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, to be a doubling of the pre-industrial revolution levels.

To learn more about how we are moving towards the CRed goal, and how you or your organization might join, we invite you to explore the resources available on this site using the links below. Many of the pages have been created by teams of undergraduate students at Carolina, who must conduct a team-based Capstone project in their junior or senior years. The pages then are edited, and vetted by, faculty and graduate students from the Carolina campus.

• The CRed Program
• The Carbon Cycle and Climate Change
• Sustainability and Carbon Reduction
• Modeling the Carbon Cycle
• The CRed Project in Cambridge, England
• The CRed Project in Chapel Hill and the Carolina Campus
• Choosing Where to Intervene