Analyzing the Thoughts of Ecological Footprints of University Students: A Preliminary Research on Turkish Students

Abstract

Investigating the carbon, food, goods and services usage and consumption levels of people to realize probable damage of consumption habits is essential to decrease ecological destruction and at the same increase consciousness of people in our planet. This paper's aim is to present the results of questionnaire of ecologic footprint that was applied to 420 Turkish students, in the southern part of the country. As a data collection tool "Ecological Footprint Quiz", placed on www.myfootprint.org site, was used. The questionnaire had four main parts. First three parts include statements about the carbon, food, goods and services footprint. Housing footprint statements has ignored in this study, because university students generally live in dormitories or rented houses, not in their own houses. The last part of the questionnaire, participants responded to demographic questions. Descriptive statistics was conducted to analyze the data.

Learning and teaching sustainability: The contribution of Ecological Footprint calculators

“…Alongside global and national level applications (e.g., Borucke et al, 2013;Coscieme et al, 2016;Kitzes et al, 2008), the EF has also been applied at regional (e.g., Bagliani et al, 2008;Hopton and White, 2012), city (e.g., Baabou et al, 2017;Moore et al, 2013), and corporate levels (e.g., Bagliani and Martini, 2012), dealing with topics ranging from wider sustainability, to carrying capacity and natural capital management, and specific sectoral issues (e.g., Bastianoni et al, 2013;Collins and Flynn, 2015;Fang et al, 2016;Galli, 2015b;Patterson et al, 2007). More recently, the application of the EF to education establishments has received increasing attention in the academic literature, with studies measuring the EF of Universities, Tertiary Colleges and High Schools in Australia (Flint, 2001), Belgium (Lambrechts and Van Liedekerke, 2014), Canada (Burgess and Lai, 2006), China (Li et al, 2008), Israel (Gottlieb et al, 2012), Portugal (Nunes et al, 2013), Spain (Fernández et al, 2016), Turkey (Südaş and Özeltürkay, 2015), United Kingdom (Wright et al, 2009) and United States (Janis 2007;Klein-Banai and Theis 2011;Venetoulis, 2001). The majority of these studies have tended to focus on measuring the resource use of students, staff and faculties (e.g., Gottlieb et al, 2012;Lambrechts and Liedekerke, 2014).…”

Determining the Perspective of Turkish Students Ecological Footprint Awareness Based Upon a Survey

“…Ecological footprint analysis was developed by William Rees et al to observe that all electricity, land and water usage for resource production over a given period of time is used (Rees et al 1996). Ecological footprint is associated with the area of productive land, energy, and water sources for a population to survive their life over the 1 year (Venetoulis 2001;Südaş and Özeltürkay 2015;. For example, two people consume approximately 100 pounds of corn and 100 pounds of wheat in a year; this requires about half an acre of ecologically productive land.…”

“…Overall, these studies indicate that education on environmental issue should be improved and the effect of individual actions on environmental quality has been emphasized (Tuncer 2008). However, in higher education, there is a limited number of studies which examine student's behavior, on the context of ecological footprint analysis (Keleş et al 2008;Özeltürkay and Südaş 2015;Südaş and Özeltürkay 2015;Li et al 2015;Eren et al 2016). Turkey's ecological footprint consumption was 2.7 gha in 2007 and this score was equal to the world average value and this score is Kassouri and Altıntaş (2020) 13 MENA countries (the Middle East and North Africa) Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, and United Arab Emirates lower than the average of Mediterranean countries.…”

“…Another recent study by Şahin et al (2018) examined the determination of ecological footprint awareness of preschool teacher candidates. Südaş and Özeltürkay (2015) analyzed the thoughts of ecological footprint of university students. In reviewing the literature, we can easily realize that there has been an increasing amount of literature on ecological footprint applied to various populations.…”

“…There have been some trigger factors (population & income level) that increase the level of ecological footprint in Turkey (Südaş and Özeltürkay 2015). Turkey has high income inequality; it causes the huge gap among the people in terms of income level (OECD 2016).…”