The current ecosocial crisis, driven by social and environmental challenges, requires a profound understanding of its causes, consequences, and potential solutions. Education emerges as a pivotal strategy for fostering ecosocial transformation, as these challenges are rooted in cultural and social structures. Addressing these issues requires fundamental shifts in lifestyles, production, and consumption patterns, underscoring the urgent need to transform educational systems and knowledge-producing organizations. To this end, integrating key sustainability competencies into academic programs is essential to promote reflection, commitment, and actionable solutions for achieving sustainability goals.

From the EHU-Aztarna project, promoted by the Sustainability and Social Commitment Directorate and aimed to assess the environmental and social footprint of academic activities at UPV/EHU, a user-friendly spreadsheet tool, accompanied by a guide, has been developed to estimate environmental footprints. This tool, central to the AZTARNAi3+ workshop, enables users to input consumption data and obtain detailed and general environmental impact results, standardized against global averages for contextual understanding.

The AZTARNAi3+ workshop, designed within an Educational Innovation Project by UPV/EHU’s Educational Advisory Service, integrates the concept of environmental footprint into higher education to foster transversal sustainability competencies. Aligned with the European GreenComp framework, the workshop emphasizes values, systemic understanding, future-oriented thinking, and actionable sustainability practices. It also develops UPV/EHU-defined competencies such as social commitment, professional ethics, critical thinking, and teamwork. The workshop’s core objectives include understanding that all human activities have quantifiable environmental impacts, recognizing the cause-effect relationship between activities and their biophysical consequences, and fostering sustainable decision-making.

Using Problem-Based Learning (PBL) as its pedagogical foundation, the workshop follows a Pre-Post design and employs the Wooclap platform for interactive classroom engagement. In the first session, students engage with dilemmas related to academic consumption habits, positioning themselves on key questions aligned with GreenComp learning outcomes. The second session involves using the footprint calculation tool to assess the environmental impact of a day’s academic activity, followed by a reevaluation of initial positions and a general workshop evaluation. An out-of-class task further encourages students to articulate challenges and propose actionable measures. The workshop also bridges environmental footprint concepts with disciplinary content, enabling the development of interdisciplinary projects.

With a multidisciplinary approach, the AZTARNAi3+ workshop has been implemented across 9 Bachelor’s and 8 Master’s programs during the 2024/25 academic year, spanning social sciences, scientific-technical fields, and humanities. Its evaluation will inform the design of educational resources for integrating environmental footprint tools into higher education curricula, advancing the university’s commitment to sustainability and ecosocial transformation. By fostering critical reflection and actionable competencies, the workshop contributes to shaping a more sustainable and socially responsible academic community.

Keywords: Environmental footprint, sustainability, higher education, Problem-Based Learning.