The college and university presidents pledged to implement short-term plans to conserve energy and reduce emissions while they develop long-range plans to convert their facilities so that they do not produce greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

Advocates said the universities and colleges were the first sector of society to make such a pledge. Signatories included community colleges and Ivy League universities; the largest institution on the list is the University of California, with its 10 campuses.

“Global warming is a defining challenge of our time,” said Arizona State University President Michael Crow, a leader of the climate campaign. “Colleges and universities must lead the effort to reverse global warming for the health and well-being of current and future generations.”

Colleges and universities that signed the pact agreed that within two years they would come up with an action plan and a target date for making their campuses “climate neutral.” For most institutions, the transformation of their campuses will take decades.

Interim actions include adopting green building standards for all construction, purchasing only energy-efficient products, using renewable energy, expanding public transportation and agreeing to offset the carbon emissions of airline travel by university employees.

The universities also pledged to increase research into ways to achieve climate neutrality.

The institutions must make their plans and periodic progress reports public so that students, in particular, can monitor their success.

“This is no small feat,” Crow said at a Washington, D.C., news conference. “This is actually a restructuring of how universities work.”

At some campuses, all existing buildings do not meet green standards and will need to be remodeled or replaced. At other schools, replacing students’ cars with nonpolluting public transportation may be the biggest challenge.

Of the 284 institutions nationwide that have signed the pact, 37 are in California. Absent from the list are some of the wealthiest universities in the United States, including Stanford, Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

Organizers said they hoped to enlist 1,000 institutions of higher learning by 2009.

In their pledge, the presidents and chancellors said they were “deeply concerned about the unprecedented scale and speed of global warming” and that they accepted the scientific consensus that the change in climate was being caused largely by humans.

“We further recognize the need to reduce the global emission of greenhouse gases by 80 percent by mid-century at the latest,” the signatories said, “in order to avert the worst impacts of global warming and to re-establish the more stable climatic conditions that have made human progress over the last 10,000 years possible.”

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