The universities that are best at research are also among the "greenest", according to a new ranking of environmental institutions. All of the Norwegian universities were at the back of the pack, including NTNU.
Proactive, foreign universities: - Much more “on point” to meet global challenges, says Jorulf Brøvig Silde, who is project leader for “Green UiO” – the University of Oslo’s green initiative. Photo: UiOUiO
While the US is not known as a place that has had the highest regard for the Kyoto Protocol during climate negotiations, American universities nevertheless have won top spots on a new green ranking list. MIT is first on the list, along with Gothenburg University in Sweden and the University of British Columbia in Canada, with 48 of 50 possible points. Stanford, Harvard and Cambridge are a close second.
Norway left behind
Norway is less green. The four Norwegian universities included in the survey of 20 universities worldwide were far behind the frontrunners. NTNU came in at 9th place with 32 points, just ahead of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences with 30 points and University of Bergen, 18.
Some universities were awarded the same number of points, so that the ranking starts at 1, which was the top rank, down to 12, which was last place.
The university that arranged the survey - the University of Oslo (UiO) – barely avoided taking last place with its score of 20 points.
Look to Sweden
UiO has invested heavily to improve its environmental image in recent years. "Green UiO" is the name of a pilot project intended to pave the way for bold action to make Oslo a "green university with high European ambitions". If UiO adopts and implements the measures it has planned, the country's largest university will increase its rating to 33 points next year, according to project manager Jorulf Brøvig Silde.
“Much more work is being done to meet global challenges at foreign universities than in Norway. Sweden, for example, is in a completely different league. The university sector there has risen to meet environmental challenges much sooner than in Norway,” he says, with reference to Gothenburg University.
“I think that American universities place a higher priority on the students’ perspective, partly because of the competition for students,” he says, as an explanation for the top rankings of the private "ivy league" universities.
Best practices a focus
There are currently no fixed standards for how to measure the environmental profile of the university sector. UiO’s investigation was conducted by a master’s student, Maryam Faghihimani. The survey design was based on The Lüneburg Sustainable University Project in International Comparison. UiO’s goal for the survey was to learn about best practices from a variety of other universities.
The survey pool consisted of 20 universities, in addition to UiO. They included the ten best universities on the Times Higher Education ranking for 2009. These were chosen to see if there was a connection between academic quality and green thinking. The survey also included three foreign universities that had won awards for their environmental efforts in recent years, four foreign universities listed at the same level as UiO in bibliometric indicators, along with three of Norway’s universities – NTNU, and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and the University of Bergen.
The survey does not represent an exhaustive list of the world's greenest universities.
Looking at commitments, not results
The study looked at 50 indicators for management, teaching, research, and daily operations. The various indicators were not scaled, but focused solely on whether a criterion was met or not. Consequently, the results reflected the universities' political commitment to environmental thinking more than their actual green performance.
The study looked at specific environmental measures for daily operations, the existence of strategies and action plans, and how green the institution's research profile and educational offerings were.
NTNU has a distinctly green profile, with prominent scientists and a centre for renewable energy.
One weakness of the study was that an institution was awarded the same number of points whether it had one or 15 such centres, says Brøvig Silde.
The university’s Environment Committee chairman, faculty director Erik Lund, has previously told UA that NTNU’s environmental efforts are under par.
“It has been difficult and dispiriting at times to try to create enthusiasm for this issue in the organization,” says Lund.
Without its own budget and with no specific position in NTNU’s top management, Lund will travel to Brekstad with the Workplace Environment Committee for a two-day seminar on Thursday and Friday this week. Lund hopes that environmental issues will on the agenda in Fosen.
Lund sees two main challenges in boosting NTNU’s environmental performance: one is the need to clarify the Environmental Committee's role and vague mandate, while the second is to see that a clearly formulated environmental strategy is rooted at the very top levels of the organization.
