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As EUA shines a ‘Spotlight on Sustainability’, EUA’s Thomas Jørgensen looks back on a decade of engagement by universities to contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and asks what today’s political context means for the remaining five years.
It is now ten years since the United Nations launched the Agenda 2030 and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). From the beginning, universities have been enthusiastic about contributing to achieving these goals – despite the SDGs originally being aimed at governments, rather than universities. Now, just five years before the 2030 deadline, it is time to take stock and move forward in a new, much-changed political context.
In the years after 2015, the colourful SDG logo proliferated on campuses around the world, and indeed on the lapels of countless academics. But these initial expressions of support soon went much further, as universities aligned their strategies with the SDGs.
Reflecting sustainability’s increased prominence, in 2019, Times Higher Education published its first impact ranking on how universities were working on the 17 goals. This ranking, and to some extent universities’ own strategies, tended to stray from the holistic spirit of the original agenda, measuring activities related to individual goals without seeing how the different parts of the agenda – people, planet and prosperity – worked as a whole.
Why were universities so enthusiastic about this agenda? Certainly because they saw working towards sustainability as a key part of their societal responsibility. Back in 2015, it arguably also provided welcome relief from the strictly economic discussions that had dominated earlier policy agendas, where politicians often focused almost exclusively on the contribution of universities to economic growth. With sustainability, there was a way to show the broad range of impacts that universities have on society.
Students and staff, as well as universities’ local communities and stakeholders like entrepreneurs , also pressed for their institutions to be more active in the area. Put simply, a university that explicitly works towards a more sustainable world is a more attractive place to study. In some cases, sustainability has become a selling point to attract talent and an opportunity to boost the reputation of the institution.
In this context, many argued that innovation and education were instrumental to meeting all of these goals. For example, in the results of EUA’s innovation survey published in 2022, 77% of respondents thought that disruptive innovation could lead to the ‘major changes necessary for sustainability’. However, significant difficulties have arguably persisted for universities in how they manage the trade-offs between the SDGs’ three different dimensions: people, planet and prosperity.
It is challenging for complex institutions like universities to create and implement strategies that make sure that activities that further sustainability grow, while those that are detrimental to sustainability are reduced, or stop altogether. The nature of the SDGs are such that they must be balanced against each other. For instance, low consumption is generally good for the environment, but it also means lower growth and less money for public health measures. Trade-offs like this are difficult to articulate and coordinate within universities.
For technological innovation in particular, substantial risks lie behind these trade-offs. For example, more efficient solutions tend to lead to lower prices and, as a consequence, higher consumption, rather than lessening the use of resources. Some technologies might prevent pollution where they are used, but require raw materials that are extracted in highly polluting mines far away. Universities can look at the environmental impact of their own operations, but it is very difficult to manage all of the trade-offs that emerge between the various goals.
Politically, the last decade has seen consequential twists and turns in the discourse on sustainability. Here in Brussels, after the first von der Leyen Commission took office in 2019, the European perspective quickly turned from a holistic concept of sustainability to one that focused mainly on climate and the environment – although it did also have an agenda for a socially just green transition.
Since last year’s election and the beginning of a new mandate, the European Green Deal has been followed up by the Clean Industrial Deal, with a much narrower focus on industrial decarbonisation. For universities, greening has to some extent dominated the agenda of the research and innovation missions but also for campus and operation management. For example, many flagship programmes for sustainability in universities are focused on energy and on climate change.
If this is the status quo, what’s next for Europe’s universities and their efforts to advance sustainability? There is a great deal yet to discuss. For this reason, this year’s EUA Annual Conference is focused on ‘Connecting the dots on sustainability and resilience’, where the Association will kick off a wide range of upcoming activities to shine a ‘Spotlight on Sustainability’, taking a closer looks at the achievements and challenges of the last decade, while looking forward to 2030 and beyond.
