Developing a Practical Framework of Sustainability Indicators Relevant to All Higher Education Institutions to Enable Meaningful International Rankings

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) sustainability assessments are receiving significant attention in the academic literature, with ever more complex grading and ranking systems being developed. This paper aims to provide national policy makers a simple set of indicators facilitate measuring progress towards for HEI sector, within context data collection efforts. Candidate were identified assessed from two most subscribed assessments, namely, UIGreenMetric STARS, develop sector specific indicator set. resulted final 12 indicators, covering on-site energy, greenhouse gas emissions, solid waste, water, travel, education, research, governance. The proposed was then compared publicly available Irish HEIs, identify gaps collection, which found that direct campus energy use associated Scope 1 2 emission alone collected sufficient rigour. described has potential be applied guiding transitions globally offers template accelerating efforts sector.