People and Planet is a British student network concerned with environmental and social justice. It has just published a league table that claims to measure the environmental and ethical performance of UK universities.
The top five universities are Cardiff Metropolitan, Bedfordshire, Manchester Metropolitan, Reading, and University of the Arts London. It is interesting that this league table shows almost no overlap with the other rankings that claim to assess commitment or contributions to sustainability.
Here are all the six British universities in the latest UI GreenMetric ranking in order: Nottingham, Nottingham Trent, Warwick, Glasgow Caledonian, Loughborough, Teesside.
The top five British universities in the THE Impact Rankings are Newcastle, Manchester, Glasgow, Leicester, King's College London. For the QS Sustainability rankings we have: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Oxford, Newcastle, Cambridge.
There is some similarity between the QS Sustainability and the THE Impact Rankings, because both give prominence to research on environmental topics. But even this is quite modest compared to the much greater overlap between conventional research based rankings such as Leiden, Shanghai or URAP (Middle East Technical University).
This surely raises serious questions about the trend to rankings based on sustainability. If the rankers produce league tables that show such a modest degree of correlation then we have to ask whether there is any point at all to the exercise.
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