COMMITMENT OF UNIVERSITIES TO IMPLEMENT SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

Sustainable development plan aims to meet the needs of current and future generations, through environmental, social and economic improvement targets, and the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 adopts 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved in the next decade by markets and institutions. Universities are institutions with a strong economic, environmental and social impact on society and play a crucial role in the education of young people. To coordinate and share the commitment to SDGs, several initiatives have been arisen by several universities, at the national, European and global level. Mainly universities’ rankings measure the progress of sustainability initiatives through the use of indicators and to compare sustainability performances. The comparison between the SDGs with the themes developed by the universities’ initiatives and ranking indicators has been allowed to verify the commitment of the universities in support of sustainable development. Research results demonstrate high attention of universities to the SDGs by announcing explicit missions and introducing new actions: most of rankings are focused on environmental performance and environmental SDGs are frequently assumed as reference in universities' rankings. Furthermore, universities frequently are interested in environmental targets of SDGs within their campuses: sustainable mobility habits, separate waste collection, plastic free initiatives, water and energy efficiency, renewable energy production, greenhouse gas emission reduction, are the most important actions included in international rankings. On the contrary, several SDGs related to economic and social aspects are still rarely used to quantify sustainability performances of universities.