Developing a sustainability reporting assessment tool for higher education institutions: The University of California

Abstract

Businesses have integrated sustainability reporting into their corporate responsibility efforts. However, universities, as the hubs of sustainability awareness, have been struggling with reporting their sustainability practices. The purpose of this study is to examine sustainability assessment tools in higher education institutions and develop a sustainability reporting assessment tool suitable for evaluating sustainability reporting in these institutions. The study attempts to fill the research lacuna in sustainability reporting in these institutions. In doing so, this study proposes a tool for assessing sustainability reporting in higher education institutions and applies the framework to the University of California. The result of the study shows that University of California is performing stronger in environmental and educational dimensions while social and governance/economic dimensions are lagging behind. Finally, it is concluded that assessment tools have failed to recognize reporting as an integral part of sustainability in universities and sustainability reporting among these institutions is still embryonic.

Communication on Sustainability in Spanish Universities: Analysis of Websites, Scientific Papers and Impact in Social Media

“…These new challenges create a need to align universities' primary missions and operations with the delivery of education that drives sustainability and removes existing barriers [8,[22][23][24][25][26][27]. Such involvement would call on universities the world over to continue to drive sustainable development as they have in recent decades by implementing the respective policies and programmes, along with methodologies for assessing their impact [5,13,24,[28][29][30]. Spanish universities have also worked intensively toward sustainability.…”

“…Sustainability reporting and its assessment could be a powerful strategy to evaluate, inform and manage the economic, social and environmental impact of a university [30]. One of the methods used to reveal universities' degree of involvement with sustainability is the analysis of the information appearing on their websites.…”

Analysing the factors affecting the incorporation of sustainable development into European Higher Education Institutions' curricula

“…During the last decade, there has been an increase in sustainable development (SD) integration into Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) (Friman, Schreiber, Kokkonen, Mutanen, & Salminen, 2018;Holm, Sammalisto, Grindsted, & Vuorisalo, 2015), where European HEIs have been leaders in this process (Disterheft, Ferreira da Silva Caeiro, Ramos, & de Miranda Azeiteiro, 2012;Karatzoglou, 2013;Sepasi, Rahdari, & Rexhepi, 2018). It has been argued that, in this process, women have tended to be more concerned about environmental sustainability than men (Von Haartman, Sammalisto, R. Lozano, & Blomqvist, 2017;Zelezny, Chua, & Aldrich, 2000).…”

Sustainable Assessment Tools for Higher Education Institutions: Guidelines for Developing a Tool for China

“…There is a call for a global tool, allowing for cross-institutional benchmarking using the same standard [9][10][11]. The framework of global SATs has been discussed, in addition to environmental topics, education and research [12], outreach activities [13,14], economic and social topics [15,16]. Although the holistic framework of global SATs was identified [17][18][19], in practice, most of the SATs are generally applied to the countries or continents where they were developed [20].…”