Ecological Indicators 11 (2011) 857–860 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ecological Indicators journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolind An urban university’s ecological footprint and the effect of climate change Cynthia Klein-Banai a,∗ , Thomas L. Theis b a Office of Sustainability, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1140 S. Paulina, Chicago, IL 60612, United States b Institute of Environmental Science and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2121 W. Taylor, Chicago, IL 60612, United States article info Article history: Received 21 July 2010 Received in revised form 11 November 2010 Accepted 13 November 2010 Keywords: Ecological footprint Sustainability indicators Higher education abstract Ecological footprint analysis (EFA) has been used since the early 1990s as a measure of sustainability for geographical regions, products, and activities. EFA is used as a measure of land and water ecosystems needed to provide the resources for a given population and process the waste that it produces in a globalized metric (global hectares), generally on an annual basis. As institutions seek ways to become more sustainable they have used a variety of metrics, ranking systems, and indicators to evaluate their baseline and progress towards those goals. An EFA for a large urban public university, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), was calculated as 97,601 global hectares (2.66 global hectares per total faculty, staff and students). The breakdown of sources is energy for the built environment (73%), transportation and commuting (13%), materials and waste (12%), and food (3%). UIC’s ecological footprint to actual landprint ratio has a value of 1005 which is 1–2 orders of magnitude higher than the other campuses that have performed EFAs. This is an indicator of the urban nature of the campus since the land resources in an urban environment are limited and the activities tend to be denser. A sensitivity analysis to examine the effect of climate change events on the footprint indicated that, if all other factors are held constant, climate change will increase the ecological footprint of UIC. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Colleges and universities are institutions that have large facil- ities encompassing many functions of a small community such as housing, laboratories, recreational facilities, transportation and grounds operations, agricultural activities, and office and class- room buildings. Large universities operate like small towns with a significant environmental impact can be at the local level. As institutions such as universities move to become more sustainable ways to measure progress are being sought such as greenhouse gas emissions and ecological footprint analysis (EFA). EFA has been proposed as a measure of sustainability since it expresses results in terms of the biophysical limits of resources used. The ecological footprint is an aggregate measure that repre- sents the amount of biologically productive land and water area required to provide resources consumed and assimilate waste pro- duced by a given entity (Conway et al., 2008). There is a benefit to having a single value (equal to land area required) that reflects resource use patterns (Constanza, 2000). The use of ecological footprinting in combination with a social and economic impact assessment can provide a measure of sustainability’s triple bot- tom line (Dawe et al., 2004), the footprinting process can help find ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 312 996 3968. E-mail address: cindy@uic.edu (C. Klein-Banai). some of the “hidden” environmental costs of consumption that are not captured by techniques such as cost-benefit analysis and environmental impact (Venetoulis, 2001), and using the ecological footprint, an assessment can be made of where the largest impact comes from (Flint, 2001). EFA specific to a university campus can also be used to compare various footprint reduction scenarios using a common measure. A number of campuses have published EFA studies (Burgess and Lai, 2006; Conway et al., 2008; Dawe et al., 2004; Flint, 2001; Li et al., 2008; Venetoulis, 2001; Wright, 2002), however, only one study involving a large public university (Ohio State, Janis, 2007) is available, and no university in a large urban area has published a comprehensive EFA. Densely populated regions can have foot- prints hundreds of times larger than their geopolitical area (Rees and Wackernagal, 1996). This study was undertaken in order to evaluate the ecological footprint of an urban, public university in the United States. Climate change studies have predicted that global warming will lead to significant changes in average temperatures by mid-century as well as change in weather patterns such as rain- fall (Meehl et al., 2007). In the East-North Central region, where Chicago is located, climate warming is likely to reduce consump- tion of heating fuel more than it increases the consumption of electricity, meaning there could be an overall decrease in energy consumption (Hadley et al., 2004). This study also examines the potential effect of those climate change scenarios on the EFA of an institution. 1470-160X/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ecolind.2010.11.002