The Sustainable Food Production and Consumption Working Group of the Sustainable Campus Network (RCS) participated, in 2020/21, in a survey of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Portugal. One of the sections of this survey aimed to better understand what is happening in HEIs in terms of the food service sustainability.Food Production and Consumption is a critical theme for sustainability and has a very high importance within the scope of actions and interventions of HEIs in the society. Training, research, internal practices, and partnerships are easily identified as ways for HEIs to impact society. The work presented here focuses on the results obtained from the survey in terms of existing partnerships and connections within the community.The survey was answered by 30 HEIs, comprehending Public and Private Universities, Polytechnic Institutes and Non-Integrated Schools. In the set of responses, 24 HEIs (80%) responded positively to the question: "Does the HEI have initiatives for the promotion of sustainable food consumption?". One of the survey goals´ was to analyse the HEIs "connection to the Community".The results show us that there are few references to the relationship regarding the supply chain, namely, on producers and HEI's. However, references to the traditional HEIs´partnerships are frequent namely functional research and teaching partners amongst other scientific areas, active networks, internships, and conferences. A good practice is the brand-new network regarding partnerships focused on the reduction of food waste and evolving academic community.The results suggest that mainly all the HEIs lack a systemic strategy of building bridges with the community, as a two-way avenue to achieve sustainability.
Tourism industry is one of the fastest growing in recent years, before the pandemic, and is a well-known industry with excessive consumption of water. Climate change together with the abusive use of water resources change the hydrological cycle, thus causing water supply problems. Consequently, tourism companies must undertake actions to change the direction based on a more structured knowledge and vision.This work is based on the study of water consumption in the various activities of tourist accommodations in the Iberian Peninsula. It aims to compare the perception of their consumption against the published reference values, as well as to apply measures to reduce water consumption.The applied methodology is based on an initial bibliographic research of the state of the art, reference values for consumption, and the influencing factors in tourist accommodation. Following, the perception of consumption is assessed through an online survey targeting Portuguese and Spanish hoteliers. The survey was conducted in the first months of 2020 and 174 responses were obtained, 101 from Spain and 73 from Portugal.The results show that the surveyed hoteliers do not have the perception of water consumption, since in general they do not make measurements, are unaware of the consumption of each sector within the hotel and mostly refer to consumption below the reference values. Regarding the measures that have already been implemented to reduce water consumption, they represent measures of lower cost and easier application and that do not require major changes.
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