Optimization for Carbon Footprint in an Institutional Campus

Abstract

Development of environmentally sustainable cities is the need of today’s fast urbanizing India. By 2050 nearly half the Indian population will be living in urban areas. Urban activities have increased the atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2), and will continue to increase. Indian cities are major producers of CO2, but are not planned for enough Carbon Storage to compensate their own Carbon Footprints. It is imperative to maintain the ‘‘balance’’ between the Carbon emission and Sequestration to achieve environmental sustainability. Any process that removes CO2 from the atmosphere and deposits it in a reservoir of any particular type (plant material, wood, soil, etc) is termed as ‘Carbon Sequestration’. The Trees make the withdrawal of CO2 from the atmosphere with the process of photosynthesis and store it in the form of growing plant material. Around 5%-21% of total photosynthetically fixed Carbon is transferred into the rhizosphere through root exudates. This study constitutes an estimation of standing biomass in the form of Plants and Trees, and the Carbon Sequestration by them at the institutional campus – ‘Udhaji Maratha Boarding Campus, Nasik’. Objective is to find their value in environmental optimization w.r.t. CO2 footprint of the campus. This study tries to estimate (i) CO2 Sequestration by existing plant material, (ii) required Sequestration as per the current Carbon footprint of the users. Further this research projects the Carbon Sequestration in the future by the current vegetation after its 100% growth.