ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – The University of New Mexico recently released its first comprehensive sustainability plan to reduce its environmental footprint, highlighting key areas it plans to change to meet better energy and operations standards. The five-year plan is a culmination of an extensive year-long process that gathered feedback from the campus community through interviews, focus groups, a campus-wide survey, and town halls.
“The plan outlines goals in the areas of energy and greenhouse gas reduction, water use and land, waste, transportation, and food and dining on the transform campus operations side,” UNM Sustainability Director Anne Jakle said. “Each goal area has a number of actions to achieve the goal.”
Each action item has to do with lessening human impact on resources like energy and water. One of which is a major campus infrastructure project to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by transitioning all new buildings to fully electric, and switching the heating systems from gas to geothermal or solar energy. The new police building will be the university’s first all-electric building, and the new CCAT building will be its second.
“The lighting systems, heating systems, cooling systems, the energy for it will all be derived from electricity,” Jakle said. “If you clean up the grid and provide more lower-carbon energy sources, you’re reducing greenhouse gas and other air emissions. Part of our project to electrify and decarbonize the campus heating means you drill these shallow wells, and you utilize the earth as a battery to store heat and harvest heat out of it. The idea is as we transform the existing heating elements to high-efficiency heat pumps, and then ultimately use the earth as a battery to absorb and emit heating and cooling potential. It’s called a geo-exchange system, and it’s a great way to electrify your campus heating system in a zero-carbon way.”
Another action item includes removing some turf around campus and replacing it with green stormwater infrastructure.
“Reducing water use and landscaping, reducing non-functional turf,” Jakle said. “Meaning turf that doesn’t have a purpose or use, like something in a median, installing green stormwater infrastructure where we can harvest the stormwater.”
Other infrastructure components in the plan deal with electric vehicle charging and implementing strategies for safer biking, scooting, and walking to campus.
“There’s a lot of transportation goals too that have to do with reducing single occupancy vehicles for campus commuting,” Jakle said. “We create a lot of traffic and that’s a lot of emissions, so we’re looking for ways to encourage walking, bicycling, and scooting to campus. We’re really getting in front of issues like water scarcity and energy transition and trying to be a model for how those items can be tackled in a way that’s good for the community. Beyond being the right thing to do for our planet and using resources wisely, it can also reduce operating costs, especially for energy efficiency measures.”
The new police headquarters building is expected to be finished in June 2026, and the CCAT building by the end of next year. The university hopes to have all these goals in motion within its five-year plan.
