A multicriteria approach for consumption footprint in higher education institutions before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

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.