A new study finds that universities scoring strongly on measures of sustainability are associated with innovation and economic growth in their surrounding communities. However, the study did not find similar connections between university sustainability performance and environmental sustainability in their home communities. "Society is facing a slew of global challenges, and we wanted to assess the extent to which higher education is contributing to the sort of transformative change needed to address these challenges," says Christopher Galik, co-author of the study and a professor of public administration at North Carolina State University. "For this study, we started at the local level, exploring whether there was any association between university sustainability performance and sustainability in their surrounding communities." To explore the issue, researchers looked at data from 105 metropolitan areas in the United States, which are collectively home to 427 higher education institutions. Specifically, the researchers drew on data from two sources, the U.S. Cities Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Index and the QS Sustainability Universities Ranking. The SDG Index aggregates dozens of metrics related to a municipality's sustainability efforts, covering issues such as climate action, energy efficiency and water use. The QS Sustainability Universities Ranking evaluates university efforts related to environmental sustainability as well as efforts aimed at addressing social concerns, such as global partnerships, community engagement and the health and well-being of students, faculty and staff. "Sustainability is complicated -- it has lots of different components," says Ha Vien, first author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University. "And we found that universities are associated with progress on some of those measures, but not others." The good news is that there was a very strong correlation between... |