Abstract
Purpose
Resources efficiency and consumption footprint have already been used to assess the impacts of higher education institutions’ (HEI) activities. However, most research has concentrated efforts only on environmental aspects while neglecting the social life cycle perspective. Moreover, there is a lack of studies that consider the context of COVID-19. This paper evaluated the environmental and social impacts associated with consumption patterns in face-to-face vs. remote classes in a Brazilian HEI before and during the pandemic.
Methods
The methodological approach consisted of environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and social LCA organized with a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) approach based on the Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique Exploiting Rank (SMARTER) method.
Results and discussion
The results revealed that 9/13 of the environmental impact categories indicated the remote class with lower impact results, whereas the results for the direct social impacts were equivalents for the two systems. In terms of indirect social impacts, however, face-to-face classes were more effective, owing to the downstream effects of fuel supply on human rights and community infrastructure. The best-performing system scenario can improve the multicriteria score for the face-to-face system by 25% and for the remote classes by 10%. Mobility was the main area of consumption affecting face-to-face classes, while food was the main priority consumption area for the remote class system. Therefore, improvements in consumption patterns in the HEIs should take these factors into account.
Conclusions
The hybrid class system performance ranked right in the middle of the face-to-face and remote scores, indicating that it should be used to improve environmental and social performance. The context of COVID-19 highlighted the importance of integrating environmental and social aspects into the LCA. The methodological approach developed can be used in future research to advance the knowledge on the implementation of environmental and social LCA in HEIs.
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Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.
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This work was supported by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) under grants 302722/2019-0 and 150662/2022-0; the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), under grant 2021/06685-1; and the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), Finance Code 001.
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Giusti, G., Farrapo Junior, A.C., Sigahi, T.F.A.C. et al. A multicriteria approach for consumption footprint in higher education institutions before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Int J Life Cycle Assess 28, 1735–1755 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-023-02225-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-023-02225-2