Ecological Footprinting as a Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approach to Complete Campus Engagement and Transformation Towards the One Planet Goal

Abstract

Enabling students to apply well-informed and skill-based understandings to their own decision-making about the dynamic relationships between individuals, societies, environments and economies in a resource constrained world is a central sustainability goal in the tertiary sector. Ecological Footprinting (EF) measures how much people have, how much they use and identifies who uses what. At Macquarie University, in Sydney Australia, EF has been applied at the campus, faculty and building scales and integrated into student learning through the undergraduate Environmental Management curriculum, where students consider their own footprints (personal and household) and investigate EF at the faculty scale. At the building scale, the University's Property Department calculates the EF of individual buildings (new and existing) to ensure as the University grows, it reaches a One Planet campus target by 2030. The students' research projects utilise the Property Department's EF tool. This has generated a cross-campus partnership across academic-non-academic, disciplinary and department structures towards institutional goals. This integrated, top-down and bottom-up approach fosters transformative engagement across the entire campus.