A recent study conducted by North Carolina State University reveals that universities excelling in sustainability practices tend to spur innovation and economic development in their local areas. Surprisingly, though, the study did not uncover comparable links between university sustainability efforts and environmental sustainability within their communities.

“Society is facing a slew of global challenges, and we wanted to assess the extent to which higher education is contributing to the sort of transformative change needed to address these challenges,” the researchers explain.

“For this study, we started at the local level, exploring whether there was any association between university sustainability performance and sustainability in their surrounding communities.”

Sustainable schools

To delve into this matter, the researchers examined data from 105 metropolitan areas across the United States, which collectively house 427 higher education institutions. They specifically analyzed information from two key sources: the U.S. Cities Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Index and the QS Sustainability Universities Ranking.

The SDG Index compiles a range of metrics concerning a city’s sustainability endeavors, encompassing factors like climate action, energy efficiency, and water management. Meanwhile, the QS Sustainability Universities Ranking assesses university initiatives pertaining to environmental sustainability, as well as endeavors addressing social issues such as global partnerships, community engagement, and the well-being of students, faculty, and staff.

The researchers aimed to discern any correlation between universities performing well on the QS Sustainability Universities Ranking and municipalities excelling on the SDGs.

A complicated issue

“Sustainability is complicated—it has lots of different components,” the authors explain. “And we found that universities are associated with progress on some of those measures, but not others.”

Encouragingly, the study revealed a robust correlation between universities achieving high marks in sustainability and communities demonstrating excellence in innovation, poverty reduction, economic advancement, and inequality mitigation.

“The bad news is that universities that perform strongly on sustainability measures are also associated with a decline in responsible consumption and production—measured here as increased air pollution and release of toxic chemicals—in their surrounding areas,” the authors conclude. “There was also little or no correlation between universities that scored well on environmental sustainability and the environmental sustainability scores of their communities.”