Sustainability Reporting At Higher Education Institutions

Introduction Multiple declarations, governmental and non-profit organizations and universities have issued a call for proper reporting of social and environmental impacts and initiatives within academia. Such reporting can increase awareness of environmental and social impacts, encourage development of sustainable policy and build a campus culture more committed to sustainability. 1 Sustainability reporting at academic institutions has the added benefit of being a powerful teaching aid. Not only does it involve students " in matters that are direct, tangible, immediate, and consequential, " the creation of a comprehensive report also " downscales global problems to a manageable size. " 2 Such benefits have created a general opinion among academic institutions that sustainability reporting should at least be considered. Reporting, however, can take many forms with obvious differences in the benefits produced. Most frequent among higher education institutions (HEIs) is environmental reporting. While environmental reporting seeks to demonstrate that an institution is paying attention to and taking appropriate action to mitigate adverse impacts on the environment, sustainability reporting attempts to build upon this and expand the scope of evaluation. 3 Thus, sustainability reporting is the most comprehensive form, allowing environmental, social and economic concerns to work together as the three legs of green, and read all over : ten rules for effective corporate environmental and sustainability reporting (Milwaukee: ASQ Quality Press, 2002), 15. 2 sustainability. 4 Further differences surface due to the lack of standardization in both environmental and sustainability reporting. HEIs use assessments, audits, footprint analyses and web-pages to address the goals of sustainability reporting. Although each method does have some characteristics which differentiate it from the others, a lack of commonly understood definitions seems to prevent uniformity within each category. Many of these more nuanced differences in reporting styles are due to the immaturity of sustainability reporting within academia. Sustainability and environmental reporting, although slowly emerging from its infancy, is often haphazard and is rarely conducted by the administrative bodies most likely to create and alter university sustainability policy. Although many anecdotal stories can be found which discuss the general process of reporting, little has been effective in bringing about standard practices for such university reports. Three years after the first American HEI sustainability report was published, David Eagan asked: How many institutions even now have bothered to analyze their resource flows of energy, water, materials, food and waste?. .. How many have attempted to minimize the damage that they …