Sustainability label for universities—DBU promotes TU Dresden's idea for a rating system

Osnabrück/Dresden. How sustainable is a university? Until now, there has been no standardized system for assessing this. The Technical University (TU) of Dresden wants to change that - with a five-stage label that evaluates the sustainability of various university-relevant fields of activity. Thirteen other colleges and universities from across the country are collaborating on the project. The Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU) is providing 276,800 euros in technical and financial support for the project.

"Only about five percent of German universities currently produce sustainability reports," says project leader Prof. Remmer Sassen. Since there are no uniform evaluation systems at the national level, he says, the reports differ from one another, sometimes considerably, and cannot be compared. A uniform system is intended to change that - based on five university-specific fields of action: Teaching, Research (generating knowledge across disciplines), Operations, Governance (understanding of values and mission statement), and Transfer (helping to shape processes). Each area is to be scaled with five to ten criteria and indicators from 0 to 5. These will be determined in a joint process with the universities. "This allows for a five-level rating for a competitive sustainability label," Sassen says. This could make improvements measurable and more controllable for the universities.

Germany-wide participation

In addition to the TU Dresden, the University of Hamburg, Greifswald, Berlin, Duisburg-Essen, Oldenburg, TU Darmstadt, the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, and the Leuphana University of Lüneburg are participating in the project. Also participating are the universities of Zittau-Görlitz, Trier (Environmental Campus Birkenfeld), Münster University of Applied Sciences, Nürtingen-Geislingen University of Applied Sciences, and Eberswalde University of Applied Sciences. Sustainability reports are to be published for at least ten project participants by the end of the project.

You can find the original text of the DBU press release here.

+++More information about this project can be found under Sustainability Assessment at Universities.+++