Carbon footprint of a university campus from Colombia

摘要

In the past 50 years, higher education institutions worldwide have progressively implemented sustainability policies focused on improving their environmental indicators and institutional image. This trend also occurs in Colombia, both in private and public institutions. One of the issues associated with sustainability that has experienced increasing interest by these entities is Climate Change, which is reflected in an increasing number of inventories of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) of an organizational nature. Following this trend, the Technological University of Pereira (UTP), as a state higher education institution, quantified its organizational carbon footprint of 2017. Through the application of the GHG Protocol methodology, direct emissions (Scope 1), indirect emissions associated with electricity (Scope 2) and other indirect GHG emissions (Scope 3) were established. In total, in 2017 UTP emitted 8969 t CO2-eq, of which 97% were scope 3 emissions, mainly due to the daily mobility of students and officials, and the construction of infrastructure. Likewise, in 2017 each member of the university community emitted 0.4 t CO2-eq. Compared to other universities in the rest of the world, the carbon footprint per person at the UTP is low, among other reasons, because the campus does not generate electricity or use heating and furthermore, in terms of proximity, UTP students and employees residences in relation to the campus are close, which allows that the daily commuting is mostly short. Additionally, the impact on total emissions of the years 2017 and 2018 of three strategies in favor of reducing the carbon footprint of UTP based on better management of water, electricity and the mobility of students and teachers was evaluated. If these strategies had been implemented in both years, the carbon footprint would have been decreased 3.1% on average in a conservative scenario and 4.8% on average on an optimistic scenario.