It is not exaggerating to say that one of the most serious global problems in the 21st
century is global warming caused by greenhouse effect gases, especially CO2, emitted by
our daily activities depend on fossil fuels. This climate change may destroy the ecosystem
in nature and even our safety of life. It is factual that presently, citizens of the world are
aware of this crisis though most of them still tend to waste energy unconsciously, e.g.
overuse of air conditioners and idle of lamps. It seems to be a human common nature that
we cannot immediately take actions to accomplish something troublesome. However, we
know that the future situation without the actions will become more serious and it will be too
late to take any actions. In order to hinder such a worst situation, people who are interested
in and studying the issue in universities should firstly begin to tackle it and contribute to
reduce CO2 emission from such a small-scale society as a university, prior to others.
From this context, our research was purposed to show how meaningful our challenges
are, to reduce CO2 emission in Yoshida campus, Kyoto University. Two strategies were
considered: (1) energy supply with less or without CO2 emission inside the campus and
(2) energy conservation by individual consumers. Focused on the former side, we chose
applicable environmental-friendly energy sources which were solar cells, a biomass power
plant and fuel cells. Under our assumptions, introduction of these energy sources possibly
reduces 40% amount of CO2 emission in Yoshida campus from that in 2008 though
energy cost would be required to increase. On the other hand, concerning to the energy
consumption side, Kyoto University reported that 8% amount of CO2 emission in 2008
could be reduced by our individual efforts such as turning off unused electrical appliances.
In light of these results, we conducted a questionnaire survey to know the motivation
of staffs and students in Yoshida campus for reducing CO2 emission. The detail of our
estimation and the survey result will be presented.