Quantitative assessment of environmental impacts at the urban scale: the ecological footprint of a university campus

Abstract

This paper explores the consumption-based ecological footprint method and its application aiming at a quantitative assessment of the sustainability of a university campus. The goal is to inform the planning decision-making process and evaluate the socio-technical solutions implemented in local urban settings for reducing energy consumption, decreasing environmental impacts and improving the quality of life of the campus' inhabitants. The case study taken for the analysis is the Politecnico di Torino, a Higher Education Institution (HEI) located in Northern Italy counting around 33,000 enrolled students in 2016. Data were collected from departments and administrative units of the Politecnico di Torino to identify the pressure exerted by the campus activities on the ecosystem during a reference year (2016). The study identified six main categories of consumption that were associated with their ecological footprint, i.e. the amount of land needed to produce the required resources and to absorb the generated waste, including CO2 emissions. Total footprint resulted in 6,200 gha: about half of the total city area, meaning that the campus would need a 310 times larger area to be self-sufficient. Normalizing this result with the number of students yields 0.19 gha/student. Transports had the highest share, with 49.4% out of the total campus impact, whereas energy covered 40.1%. Food, waste, land use and water counted, respectively, for 5.7%, 3.7%, 0.7% and 0.5%. This study presents the most comprehensive analysis to date of the environmental impact associated with an Italian HEI. This methodology and its implementation for the specific case of HEIs contribute to gain a better understanding of the overall impact of a university campus, as well as to create thresholds for comparative analysis, decision-making tools and policymaking to reduce the ecological footprint of the educational sector.

Sustainability Assessment of Higher Education Institutions: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Ref. [29] examined the consumption-based ecological footprint technique (EFM) and its application to quantify university campus sustainability.…”

Perspectives of Environmental Awareness in University Students

“…Given the great ecological and socioeconomic problems worldwide produced by hyper competitive approaches introduced by corporate organizations in recent years it is necessary to focus on commercially sustainable strategies (Pascucci et al, 2022), therefore, a great goal that is sought to be achieved in the industrial sector is the implementation of responsible business practices by entrepreneurs thus contributing to responsible economic growth (Del Brio et al, 2022), since, unsustainable and irresponsible consumption and production threaten nature and therefore the human being, for this reason, throughout the world many professionals focus on sustainability issues and adopt ecological strategies to preserve the environment (X. . Since a few years ago, developing countries are generating more and more waste in daily life (D. Want et al, 2022), for this, a way to quantitatively evaluate the sustainability of study centers is applying the ecological footprint method based on its application and consumption (Genta et al, 2022), on the other hand, the school and preschool stage play a fundamental role in environmental education and in the formation of good attitudes towards the environment (Zhakupova et al, 2022), because public awareness about the care of the environment plays an important role in the implementation of environmental strategies and policies (Gherhes et al, 2022).…”