UW-Eau Claire is joining hundreds of other schools across the nation in the promise to “go green”.

It’s all part of the national American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. It’s a pledge that says each campus will become carbon neutral.

The university’s Chancellor, Brian Levin-Stankevich recently made a commitment to set and attain sustainable energy and environmental goals on campus.

He says the Climate Commitment not only fits in well with the university’s on-going strategic planning process, but also signifies the desire to make the school a “green” place to learn.

"This generation of students is very, very focused on stewardship and understands the connection between their actions and their children's world,” Levin-Stankevich said. “Between our actions today and what they're gonna' have to pay for years and years and years down the road."

Levin-Stankevich says the university will not work to do things like reduce greenhouse gases, and limit dependence on imported energy sources.

A strategic planning work group member says UW-Eau Claire’s efforts to “go green” could also have an impact on the people who live in the Chippewa Valley.

"If we can live what we preach, if we can find ways to reduce greenhouse gases as individual faculty and as individual students, and then more broadly through providing our students and ourselves with an increased knowledge base to go forward into the 21st century with the skills needed to kind of take that beyond the campus and into the communities,” Marc Goulet said.

Levin-Stankevich says UW-Eau Claire will soon put together a task force of experts and university students to come up with even more ways to become carbon neutral.

He says several other UW schools have also signed-on to be part of the climate commitment.