Vision and Mission

Core Values

Our Mission and Vision are grounded in seven fundamental values:

• Excellence: We promote and engage in path-breaking science, policy, and business models that build on a fundamental commitment to analytic rigor, data, intellectual integrity, and excellence.
• Leadership: We attract outstanding students nationally and internationally and offer a pioneering curriculum that defines the knowledge and skills needed to be a 21st century environmental leader in a range of professions.
• Sustainability: We generate knowledge that will advance thinking and understanding across the various dimensions of sustainability.
• Community: We offer a community that finds strength in its collegiality, diversity, independence, commitment to excellence, and  lifelong learning.
• Diversity: We celebrate our differences and identify pathways to a sustainable future that respects diverse values including equity, liberty, and civil discourse.
• Collaboration: We foster collaborative learning, professional skill development, and problem-solving — and we strengthen our scholarship, teaching, policy work, and outreach through partnerships across the university and beyond.
• Responsibility: We encourage environmental stewardship and responsible behavior on campus and beyond.

Guiding Principles

In pursuit of our Mission and Vision, we:

• Build on more than a century of work bringing science-based strategies, ethical considerations, and conservation practices to natural resource management.
• Approach problems on a systems basis and from interdisciplinary perspectives.
• Integrate theory and practice, providing innovative solutions to society’s most pressing environmental problems.
• Address environmental challenges at multiple scales and settings — from local to global, urban to rural, managed to wild.
• Draw on the depth of resources at Yale University and our network of alumni who extend across the world.
• Create opportunities for research, policy application, and professional development through our unique centers and programs.
• Provide a diverse forum to convene conversations on difficult issues that are critical to progress on sustainability.
• Bring special focus on the most significant threats to a sustainable future including climate change, the corresponding need for clean energy, and the increasing stresses on our natural resources.

Statement of Environmental Policy

As faculty, staff, and students of the Yale School of the Environment, we affirm our commitment to responsible stewardship of the environment of our School, our University, the city of New Haven, and the other sites of our teaching, research, professional, and social activities.

In the course of these activities, we shall strive to:

•  reduce our use of natural resources;
•  support the sustainable production of the resources we must use by purchasing renewable, reusable, recyclable, and recycled materials;
•  minimize our use of toxic substances and ensure that unavoidable use is in full compliance with federal, state, and local environmental regulations;
•  reduce the amount of waste we generate and promote strategies to reuse and recycle those wastes that cannot be avoided;
• restore the environment where possible.

Each member of the School community is encouraged to set an example for others by serving as an active steward of our environment.