Water Footprint training in the International Summer School "Life-Cycle Approaches to Sustainable Regional Development "

Green thinking has to drive development in agriculture, industry, transport, services and administration; greener business models have to encourage consumers towards more sustainable lifestyles. In order to be competitive, all companies need to be eco-efficient – adding more value to a good or service while using less resources and releasing less pollutants.

The aim of the school is to familiarize students with tools which are useful to understand and evaluate the dimensions of sustainability of a wide range of activities.

The competencies acquired during the Course will enable the students to understand not only how the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) could be used in different contexts and situations in order to face the challenges of sustainable development, but also how some specific indicators may help organizations to improve their environmental performance. In particular, relying on the bases of the Life-Cycle Approach, Carbon Footprint (CF) and Water Footprint (WF) tools will be analyzed.

The CF and WF concepts were introduced about ten years ago, in order to meet the increasing concerns of businesses, governments, and consumers about climate change and freshwater scarcity. The instruments have been further developed so as to be used, by any kind of organization, to minimize their resource consumption and environmental impact, as well as their related responsibilities.

Another purpose of the school is to provide students with the basic principles ofIntegrated Reporting, an innovative communication process that can help managers to take more sustainable decisions and enables investors and other stakeholders to understand how an organization is really performing in creating value, taking into account its economic, environmental, and social impacts.