CALCULATION OF THE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT CENTRAL UNIVERSITY "MARTA ABREU" VILLAS

Abstract

In the work appears a methodology for the calculation of the ecological footprint in the university, is defined as the area of productive territory (aquatic cultures, grass, forests or ecosystems) ecologically necessary to produce the used resources and to assimilate the residues produced by a population determined with a specific standard of life of indefinite form, it is where it is that is that area, evaluates
a certain model of life and person and year express themselves commonly in hectares by, representing the Planet surface necessary to assimilate the impact of the activities of the analyzed model of life. The footprint of a population is determined by its number of members, the volume of consumption and the intensity in the use of the resources to provide it with goods and services. From the point of view of the environmental impact, a university can be considered like a system integrated within its surroundings, with entrances associated to the consumption of natural resources: fossil water, materials (construction of buildings), paper and fuels (electrical energy, calorific energy, mobility) and exits (production of residues). At the moment several prestigious universities of the world calculate your ecological footprint, for Cuban universities do not report these calculations, reason why the procedure can be extrapolated to other centers of superior education in our country. The used method is recommended by Lopez Alvarez of the Office of Sustainable Development of the University of Santiago de Compostela; the same is applied in several universities of Spain, in other countries of Europe and Latin America. For the calculation of the CO2 emissions emission factors are used, obtained of diverse used sources on international scale and the average carbon fixation for a cuban forest land, that is accumulated in biomass (lives and dead) and ground (vegetal earth and mineral ground), is considered considering the cuban conditions.