How sustainable is a university? Until now, there has been no uniform system for assessing this. The Chair of Business Administration, esp. Sustainability Management and Environmental Accounting at the TU Dresden wants to change this - with a five-stage label that evaluates the sustainability of various university-relevant fields of activity. Thirteen other colleges and universities from all over Germany are participating. The German Federal Foundation for the Environment (DBU) is providing technical and financial support for the project with 276,800 Eur.
"Only about five percent of German universities currently publish sustainability reports," says project leader Prof. Dr. 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), Operation, 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 universities.

Germany-wide participation
In addition to the TU Dresden, the universities 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. For at least ten project participants, sustainability reports are to be published by the end of the project.

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DBU-press release (in German)