International Industrial Ecology Day 2021

The global contribution of organizations and corporations to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is noteworthy. In order to implement the Paris Agreement, signature countries will need to regulate or to provide incentive for agents in a variety of organizations to report their carbon footprints. In this sense, educational institutions, because of their strong social influence, could be compelled to report and control their environmental performances. Within this general framework, the objective of this paper is to assess the carbon footprint of a private university operating in the city of Bogotá, Colombia. On the basis of the city input-output table (IOT), nested into a Multi-Regional input-output table (MRIO) framework, we propose the estimation of the three categories of the carbon footprint (scopes 1, 2 and 3), identified by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, using a multiregional tiered hybrid analysis as a result of the university’s energy and any other input expenditure.
Besides the novelty of the methodological contribution ––the nested IOT for Bogotá, constructed by city authorities in 2012, into the MRIO framework provided by OECD using data on international trade obtained from Colombia’s office of statistics—, this is the first paper estimating a Higher Educational Institution carbon footprint in Colombia. Considering the fact that corporate responsibility has a reduced scope in Latin American countries, compared to European countries (e.g. no emissions reduction obligations are in place for firms), this study can give fresh evidence on the role of organizations on climate change that can be incorporated into the environmental policy agenda of both the city of Bogotá and Colombia.