Le Università: un’energia per il territorio

The reduction of the environmental footprint of human activities is a priority according to many of the goals of sustainable development as defined by the United Nations in September 2015 1. An efficient use of resources, along with a significant penetration of renewable energy sources, are key elements in order to achieve such objectives. Effective communication strategies are also extremely important, in order to share the knowledge in the field and increase the involvement of all stakeholders. The dissemination of the results achieved thanks to training, educational and information activities are indeed a very effective mean to increase the level of active participation, to improve the efficiency of innovation projects and thus to help achieving the best results. Universities play a key role in this scenario because of their dimension of social agglomerations and their essential function in the field of both advanced training and interdisciplinary research. In particular, the Universities of Lazio have long been engaged in the field of sustainable energy use with a plurality of activities, including obviously teaching and research, but also the so-called ‘third mission’ (technology transfer, training and information). The plurality of typical functions of a middle-size university (services, health care, residence, catering, transport and logistics) makes a university campus an open-air laboratory for experimenting actions that can be replicated on a larger urban scale. This role can be an example of a ‘bottom-up’ development of programming interventions aimed at sustainability and energy planning, to be replicated on a larger scale at the local, regional and national levels.