Developing a Practical Framework of Sustainability Indicators Relevant to All Higher Education Institutions to Enable Meaningful International Rankings

William Horan,Bernadette O’Regan

doi:10.3390/su13020629

William Horan, Bernadette O’Regan

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13020629

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Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: Jan 11, 2021
Citations: 10	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Limerick

Abstract

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) sustainability assessments are receiving significant attention in the academic literature, with ever more complex grading and ranking systems being developed. This paper aims to provide national policy makers with a simple set of indicators to facilitate measuring progress towards sustainability for the HEI sector, within the context of national sustainability data collection efforts. Candidate indicators were identified and assessed from the two most subscribed to HEI sustainability assessments, namely, the UIGreenMetric and STARS, to develop a sector specific indicator set. This resulted in a final set of 12 indicators, covering on-site energy, greenhouse gas emissions, solid waste, water, travel, education, research, and governance. The proposed indicator set was then compared to publicly available data for Irish HEIs, to identify gaps in data collection, which found that direct campus energy use and associated Scope 1 and 2 emission data alone were collected with sufficient rigour. The described indicator set has the potential to be applied to guiding national sustainability transitions globally and offers a template for accelerating sustainability data collection efforts for the HEI sector.

Highlights

Sustainability assessments, a practical indicator set was developed for the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) sector
Existing international frameworks measure different aspects of sustainability and are not using optimal metrics, so for these reasons are not satisfactory for all HEIs to adopt for monitoring their transition to greater sustainability
The novelty of this study entailed the development of a simple indicator set to guide the HEI sector on its transition towards sustainability, based on consensus between the most frequently used indicator frameworks, so that many HEIs will be familiar with indicators selected

Summary

Introduction

Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) have been identified as actors with considerable influence in shaping the mindsets and values of the general population in relation to sustainability issues through education, while playing a significant role in societal transitions toward sustainable development patterns through research and collaboration with societal actors [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Numerous ways in which HEIs can facilitate transitions towards sustainability include changes in education curriculum, governance structures, campus operations, research focus, and outreach activities, as current practices are considered by many authors to be unsustainable in the long term [14,15,16,17,18]

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