Ecology, Environment and Conservation Paper

OPTIMIZATION FOR CARBON FOOTPRINT IN AN INSTITUTIONALCAMPUS

Prajakta Baste and Ar. Hemant Thakare

Abstract

Development of environmentally sustainable cities is the need of today’s fast urbanizing India. By 2050nearly half the Indian population will be living in urban areas. Urban activities have increased theatmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2), and will continue to increase. Indian cities are major producers ofCO2, but are not planned for enough Carbon Storage to compensate their own Carbon Footprints. It isimperative to maintain the ‘‘balance’’ between the Carbon emission and Sequestration to achieveenvironmental sustainability. Any process that removes CO2 from the atmosphere and deposits it in areservoir of any particular type (plant material, wood, soil, etc) is termed as ‘Carbon Sequestration’. TheTrees make the withdrawal of CO2 from the atmosphere with the process of photosynthesis and store it inthe form of growing plant material. Around 5%-21% of total photosynthetically fixed Carbon istransferredinto the rhizosphere through root exudates. This study constitutes an estimation of standing biomass in theform of Plants and Trees, and the Carbon Sequestration by them at the institutional campus – ‘UdhajiMaratha Boarding Campus, Nasik’. Objective is to find their value in environmental optimization w.r.t.CO2 footprint of the campus. This study tries to estimate (i) CO2 Sequestration by existing plant material,(ii) required Sequestration as per the current Carbon footprint of the users. Further this research projectsthe Carbon Sequestration in the future by the current vegetation after its 100% growth.