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.