Sustainability in Universities: DEA-GreenMetric

Many universities are currently doing important work not only on environmental issues, but also on social and economic matters, thereby covering the three dimensions of sustainability. This paper used data envelopment analysis to construct a synthetic indicator based on the variables that make up the UI GreenMetric. The aim was to quantify the contribution of universities to sustainability, rank all campuses accordingly, and evaluate specific aspects of their related institutional policies. First, cluster analysis was applied, yielding four homogeneous groups of universities. DEA was then applied to these clusters in order to construct the synthetic indicator. The proposed indicator, DEA-GreenMetric, revealed that the USA and the UK were the countries that were home to the greatest number of universities actively involved in all aspects of sustainability. In addition, this new index provides a complete ranking of universities, circumventing the issue of the duplicate scores assigned by UI GreenMetric. Finally, it can be seen that greater efforts are required for universities to improve their performance relating to environmental variables (energy, water use, and waste treatment) than to make improvements in infrastructure, transport, or education.