Sustainability in universities: DEA-Greenmetric

Abstract

[EN] Many universities are currently doing important work not only on environmental issues, but also on social and economic matters, thereby covering the three dimensions of sustainability. This paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis to construct a synthetic indicator based on the variables that make up the UI GreenMetric. The aim is to quantify universities' contribution to sustainability, rank all the campuses accordingly, and evaluate specific aspects of their related institutional policies. First, cluster analysis is applied, yielding four homogeneous groups of universities. DEA is then applied to these clusters in order to construct the synthetic indicator. The proposed indicator, DEA-GreenMetric, reveals that the US and the UK are the countries that are home to the greatest number of universities actively involved in all aspects of sustainability. In addition, this new index provides a complete ranking of universities, circumventing the issue of the duplicate scores assigned by UI GreenMetric. Lastly, it can be seen that greater efforts are required for universities to improve their performance relating to environmental variables (energy, water use and waste treatment) than to make improvements in infrastructure, transport or education.Puertas Medina, RM.; Martí Selva, ML. (2019). Sustainability in universities: DEA-Greenmetric. Sustainability. 11(14):1-17. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11143766S1171114Kuhlman, T., & Farrington, J. (2010). What is Sustainability? Sustainability, 2(11), 3436-3448. doi:10.3390/su2113436Castellani, V., & Sala, S. (2010). Sustainable performance index for tourism policy development. Tourism Management, 31(6), 871-880. doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2009.10.001Togtokh, C. (2011). Time to stop celebrating the polluters. Nature, 479(7373), 269-269. doi:10.1038/479269aSharp, L. (2002). 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