The Australian National University (ANU) will be the first university in the country to commit to reducing greenhouse emissions to negative levels by 2030. In an announcement on Thursday, ANU Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt said the university was “walking the walk” in tackling climate change in an ambitious initiative called the Below Zero Initiative. “As Australia’s national university, we are committed to not only reducing and offsetting our emissions but also taking more carbon out of the atmosphere than we put in,” Schmidt said. ANU wants to achieve net-zero emissions by 2025 before its negative emissions by 2030 goal, meaning it wants to offset emissions that cannot be avoided. Schmidt claimed that it would be easy for the university to transition to meet this goal, given they were able to identify that their greatest emissions were from heating and business travel. “In our case, we use a lot of natural gas …