Virtual Water Consumption: A Case Study in a Higher Education Institution in Northeast Brazil

Water limitation has driven punctual global actions in search of efficient management strategies, to calculate the sustainability indices, as the water footprints can guide these efforts. With the aim of estimating the water footprint of the academic community of the Rural Health and Technology Center of the Federal University of Campina Grande, an exploratory study was carried out with sample groups of undergraduate and graduate courses of the unit. The exploratory research consisted of the application of questionnaires, the answers being processed in the calculator of the water footprint. The water footprint of the studied academic community is below the Brazilian average and higher than the global average, except for the degree course of the Masters in Veterinary Medicine, where the water footprint exceeded the national average. It was possible to reduce the twelve original variables into three latent variables, evidencing that the use of multivariate statistics was efficient in analysing the data of the water footprint.