Our university improved its ranking by 25 places in this year's University of Indonesia GreenMetric summary, marking the launch of the Sustainability Flagship Program.
Eötvös Loránd University’s Sustainability Flagship Program, announced for the new rector cycle, aims to make sustainability a fundamental value of the university’s operation and culture in the future. This will permeate all of ELTE’s core activities, including operations, community building, as well as data-driven and measurable institutional sustainability practices.
The university is building on solid foundations, as the sustainability mindset has already manifested itself in the institution’s operation over the past years. ELTE’s presence and results in international university rankings focusing on sustainability provide important evidence for this.
UI GreenMetric was first announced in 2010, at which time 95 institutions competed; this year, however, universities from 105 countries—1,745 in total—participated. Despite the strong international field, ELTE reached the 400th place this year, improving by 25 positions compared to last year. This placed ELTE fourth among Hungarian universities. In total, 13 Hungarian universities competed on the list.
The UI GreenMetric university sustainability questionnaire covers six topics: location and infrastructure, energy and climate change, waste and water management, transportation, education. These topics contribute differently to the overall score, with water management having the smallest weight and energy and climate change the largest.
ELTE performed particularly well in education/research (research, formal and informal education, scientific articles, grants), water management, energy, and infrastructure fields, and also maintained its status in waste management (Together for Environmental Awareness program) and transportation categories. The institution ranks among the top five hundred in five out of six fields, and in education and research, it is among the top three hundred globally.
This year, the examination of how the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are implemented in university operations appeared as a new element, so the sustainability aspects assigned to individual subfields were also assessed. Depending on the relevance to the particular topic, 7–17 UN SDGs are applied in the different subfields.
At the top of the overall sustainability ranking is Wageningen University (Netherlands), followed by University College Cork, and Nottingham Trent University. Among the top ten, there are two German, one Italian, one English, one Irish, two Dutch, two American, and one Brazilian university.