trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

MEASURING ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITYAMONG UNIVERSITIESMaryam FaghihimaniUniversity of Oslo, Norway, University of Tampere, Finland &University of Aveiro, Portugal1. IntroductionHigher Education (HE) is facing one of the greatest challenges in meeting its responsibility to providethe knowledge and educated citizenry that will lead to a sustainably thriving civil society. Sustainabilityis becoming an integral part of university life. A global trend among universities shows that they arerevising their missions and strategies by embodying sustainability on their agenda. Furthermore theyhave been restructuring the courses and research programs as well as technical operations on campus toinclude sustainability in their perspectives (Wals, 2004). The long list of signatories of variousdeclarations which promote sustainability in higher education is another proof of this change. TheTalloires Declaration, The COPERNICUS Charter and Luneburg Declaration are some examples.Environmental sustainability (ES) as one of the main pillars of sustainable development hasappeared to be a global challenge. The emergence of ES in HE is a relatively new phenomenon. ESdeclarations, specifically advanced for HE, emerged in the early 1990 (Wright, 2004). These declarationsappealed to colleges and universities to take environmental concerns into consideration within thegeneral framework of institution. The emphasis is not only on daily practices and technical operationsbut also on governance, education, research activities and community services at the universities. Theidea of universities morally are obliged to become the model of ES has root back in ES for HEdeclarations. Therefore universities which have been signed the declaration, have given a pledge to showtheir commitment by implementing ES in their policies and practices.Analyzing universities commitment to the declarations and in general to environmental issues canclarify the role of universities in dealing with such a global challenge. Given that ES for HE is a new field,efforts to benchmark universities’ responses to quest of ES are very scent and limited. Benchmarking isa search for the best practices that lead to superior performance. This study conducts a systematicmethod to measure performance of the University of Oslo (UiO) with regards to ES commitmentsagainst 20 international research universities.253