![]() In this article, however, we understand and analyse university sustainability as a technical term, with respect to CO 2-equivalent emissions of campuses. The institutional sustainability of a university has been quantified and evaluated by a variety of research attempts, like as, e.g., sustainability contents in university education. Hence, it should be essential to develop sustainable universities from every point of view. We like to hypothesize that particularly universities emphasizing sustainability actions might inspire scientists engaged in sustainability research, and will qualify engineers engaged in seeking sustainable practise. This contribution discusses and evaluates the sustainability of the institutions that are the origin of sciences: the universities. ![]() Only one zero emission university was identified, and hence, the transformation should speed up globally. From this study, we observed that, almost 30 years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (1992), the results are still limited. In this study, we attempted to standardize the CF metrics, allowing us to objectively compare the CF at several universities. The usual reporting of CO 2 emissions is categorized into Scopes 1–3 following the GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting Standard which makes comparison across universities challenging. The three top performing universities are located in Switzerland, Chile, and Germany. Instead the per capita measure correlates with the national per capita CFs, and it reaches on average 23% of the national impacts per capita. We next aggregated the results for all three impact measures, arriving at an overall carbon performance for the respective universities, which we found to be independent of geographical latitude. In addition to the aforementioned two metrics, we suggested a new metric expressing the economic efficiency in terms of the CF per $ expenditures and year. However, we identified ten universities reaching a per capita carbon footprint of lower than or close to 1.0 Mt (metric tons) CO 2e/person and year (normalized by the number of people associated with the university), independent from the university’s size. Both metrics vary by one order of magnitude across the different universities in this study. The CF performance of each university in the respective year is thus homogenized, and measured by means of two metrics: CO 2e emissions per capita and per m 2 of constructed area. ![]() The CF data were also evaluated, partly corrected, and augmented by missing contributions, to improve the consistency and comparability. For the first time, CF data from universities were not only compared. Essential factors contributing to the university CF were identified. ResultsĬomprehensive CF data of 20 universities from around the globe were collected and analysed. Unfortunately, there is limited consistency between the reported carbon footprints (CFs) because of different analysis methods, different impact measures, and different target definitions by the respective universities. However, only a small number of universities worldwide are collecting and publishing their carbon footprints, and some of them have defined zero emission targets. Universities, as innovation drivers in science and technology worldwide, should be leading the Great Transformation towards a carbon–neutral society and many have indeed picked up the challenge.
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