Data Collection for Sustainability Ranking 2024 will open on 1 May 2023. Please look for an email from QS Rankings soon.
The QS World University Rankings: Sustainability provides students with a unique lens on which institutions are demonstrating a commitment to a more sustainable existence. More than just the commitment, it looks for outwards evidence of this - from the impact that alumni are making in science and technology to solve climate issues, to the impact of research being done across the UN's 17 sustainable development goals. It evaluates the social and environmental impact of universities as a center's of education and research, as well as a major employers with the operational sustainability challenges of any large and complex organization.
The 2nd edition of this ranking will have three categories: Environmental Impact, Social Impact and Governance. With each category, there are a series of performance lenses, themselves composed of an aggregated set of individual metrics.
|
Category |
Overall Weight |
| - | |
| Environmental Impact (2nd Edition) | - |
| Governance (2nd Edition) | - |
Eligibility and Inclusion
To be eligible for this ranking in its current form the following condition was applied:
| Intent | Explanation |
| Eligibility for QS Rankings | Institutions must be eligible for QS World University Ranking, QS Regional Rankings or Subject Rankings. Business Schools are not currently able to participate in this ranking. |
To be included in this ranking, the following criteria is also applied:
| Intent | Explanation |
| Commitment to mitigate climate crisis | We will look for evidence that a university has a policy or strategy on how they will mitigate the impact of their operations on the climate and the environment. From our experience, this typically takes the form of a standalone policy document, or a significant addition to their overall mission and strategy documents. |
Publication vs. Evaluation
As with any QS Ranking, we are typically able to evaluate a much larger set of institutions than we publish. The decision on which threshold to publish depends on a variety of factors, but most importantly on the data breadth and depth as well as the maturity of the ranking. In the inaugural Sustainability Ranking, we were able to score more than 700 institutions based on e.g., Scopus and reputation data (which we can collect independently and without direct participation), as well as country-level data - and so even if an institution has not made the publication threshold for the standalone ranking, institutions have a chance to be featured in the QS World University Ranking's Sustainability Metric.
General note on evidence:
In our QS HUB portal, different data fields have different forms for evidence. Some require a URL, some require an upload, and some require a supporting statement. One size doesn't fit all, and we understand that institutions may have a PDF rather than a link (e.g. a policy may be in their staff handbook, which is not linked on their website). Speak with our Institution Support Team - they are happy to help you provide the right evidence for the right questions.
All submissions are taken to be a true and open confirmation of that data point by the university. QS reserves the right to ask for further evidence where we are not confident in the submission. Any submissions found to be misleading will be rejected. Deliberate attempts by an institution to submit false data will result in penalties or exclusion from the ranking.