Assessing sustainability on Chinese university campuses: Development of a campus sustainability evaluation system and its application with a case study

Abstract

With the vigorous promotion of national policies and funds, green campus construction is booming in Chinese universities. It's in great need to develop an evaluation system, as a long-term mechanism, to assess and compare the sustainability performance in different Chinese universities, and to guide the green campus revolution in Chinese universities. Aiming at the characteristics of green campus evolution in China, a campus sustainability evaluation system is developed, that contains five categories of Organization & Management (C1), Energy & Resource Saving (C2), Friendly Environment (C3), Campus Culture (C4), and Social Outreach (C5). The indicators include mandatory indicators, all of which must be met in order to pass the evaluation, and optional indicators, which take the form of scoring. The scores of all optional indicators should be accumulated to get the final score. The achievements and shortcomings of sustainable campus development in a pilot Chinese university were revealed by this system as a case study, and the results indicate more attention should be paid on C1, C2, C4, and hence detailed suggestions were put forward. Discussions are made in terms of the potential contribution and the limitation of this evaluation system, and the capacity building needed to generalize the evaluation in China.