Carbon footprint assessment tool for universities: CO2UNV

Universities, as organisations engaged in education, research and community services, play an important role in promoting sustainability and should be an example of a sustainable organisation. The Carbon Footprint (CF) is a very useful decision-making tool that allows organisations to measure and communicate the effect of their activities on the environment. To do so, it is necessary to have tools capable of calculating, tracking and reporting their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as well as guiding the actions for reducing and offsetting them. The aim of this article is to present a tool specifically designed to calculate the carbon footprint of universities, called CO2UNV. This tool is able to quantify the CO2 equivalent (CO2e) emissions for scopes 1 (direct GHG emissions), 2 (electricity indirect GHG emissions) and 3 (other indirect GHG emissions), for a university as a whole and for the different buildings/units that it is made up of. It includes, by default, the typical emission sources of an education centre and their corresponding emission factors. However, it is totally adaptable to any other type of organisation thanks to the possibility of including new emission sources and of updating all the emission factors (by default and new). It is also capable of evaluating the evolution of the CF over time, and the CO2e offsets achieved by contributing to offset projects. The results report includes input data and the graphical representation of results. Finally, CO2UNV is applied to calculate and offset the CF of the Universitat Jaume I (Spain), and the study concludes with its validation according to applicability and accuracy criteria.