Developing a university sustainability report: Experiences from the university of leeds

Abstract

During the last decade, an increasing number of higher education institutions (HEIs) have engaged in incorporating and institutionalizing sustainability into the university system, which includes curricula, research, operations, outreach, and assessment and reporting. This paper focuses on the assessment and reporting element, where a number of tools and guidelines have been devised. One of the best options available is the global reporting initiative (GRI) sustainability guidelines. However, the GRI guidelines were not developed for universities. To address this, the Graphical Assessment of Sustainability in Universities (GASU) tool was developed, which can also help to produce a more holistic report. This chapter presents the process undertaken to develop the first draft of the University of Leeds sustainability report. The purpose of this report was to: (1) to compile the required information, (2) to create the first draft of the sustainability report, and (3) to analyze the performance values from the information collected. The data was analyzed with an updated version of GASU. The results show that the University of Leeds out performs other universities that have published sustainability reports, in all of the dimensions and their averages. The report exercise revealed that when preparing a sustainability report it is important to have a holistic perspective, addressing the different interrelations between indicators, categories, and dimensions, as well as throughout the university system. In the process of preparing a report is it is important to have sufficient time and access for data collection, as well as engaging with stakeholders. A tool, such as GASU, allows the data collection and analysis to be more systematic. The results can be used to tackle those areas where the university could improve, with respect to sustainability, across its entire system, including curricular, research, operations, and outreach.