Air quality monitoring on university campuses as a crucial component to move toward sustainable campuses: An overview

The infrastructure and activities of university campuses (UCs) can generate adverse environmental impacts. Consequently, UCs have been forced to include a sustainability perspective in planning and implementing institutional policies, including air quality monitoring. This paper presents a review of air quality studies regarding chemical pollutants (gases and particles) carried out in UCs during the last 10 years using a university sustainability approach. Methodologically, we used bibliometric tools (such as the “Bibliometrix” R package) and descriptive approaches. The results indicated a lack of publications regarding air quality in UCs, but there has been growing interest in this topic recently. The countries that registered the highest bibliographic production, considering the institutional affiliations of the authors, were the United States, China, Germany, Brazil, and Italy, and particulate matter was identified as the most analyzed air pollutant in indoor and outdoor environments. The study perspectives of the subject are diverse and range from relating the characteristics of buildings with indoor air quality to the development of technological devices to optimize spatial and temporal air quality monitoring under smart campus approaches. At the end of the manuscript, several challenges that may initiate future research fields to strengthen the sustainability of UCs are mentioned.