How is the carbon footprint of university students?

Considering one of the most interesting areas to work on climate change awareness in society, we have approached the universities to identify their impact in terms of the carbon footprint of the spanish university students.

We would have liked to be able to compare how it changes from one university to another, associated with factors such as climate, campus location, or even how it changes between students of different degrees, but the amount of data obtained in each specific university has not been sufficient in the first edition, in 2020, of our project Cartografía Carbono.

But we have been able to aggregate data from university students by region and observed some differences. For example, we have seen that the carbon footprint of university students in Madrid is 12% more than in the Canary Islands.

Where does this difference come from? We did not observe significant differences in the categories of food and lifestyle, indicative of similar socio-economic characteristics of the participants in both groups.

But we do see a difference in Home and Transport. We associate this to the local climate and the size of the cities where the campuses are located, which make the Canary Islands a more favourable place for a student to have lower CO2 emissions.

If you want to know more about our study, you can download the full report here.

If you are interested in knowing your carbon footprint and reducing your greenhouse gas emissions you can download The Planet App for iOS or Android.