Get started with sustainability assessment at your university
Assess the sustainability performance of your university or college with the University Sustainability Assessment Framework (UniSAF). The tool helps you to make sustainability assessments cheaper, easier, faster and more fun.
University Sustainability Assessment Framework (UniSAF)
UniSAF is a sustainability assessment tool for universities or colleges. It offers you a set of indicators to collect, analyse, and communicate on the sustainability performance of your university, college or campus.
UniSAF can be used by:
- Students and staff who want to better understand how their institution performs on sustainability,
- Students searching for a thesis topic,
- Teachers looking for course assignments,
- Sustainability staff tasked with writing a sustainability report.
UniSAF is freely available, easy to use, and tailored towards the higher education sector. That makes it easy for you to assess the sustainability of your university.
Components
The sustainability assessment tool includes:
- Indicators: No need to ‘invent’ your own indicators. Just get inspired by the list that we already compiled. The core of UniSAF is an excel sheet that provides quantitative and qualitative indicators.
- Database template: No need to reinvent the wheel to collect and analyse your data. Just use our database template.
Use it in a flexible way
You can adapt UniSAF in a flexible way. Use it to create:
- A short overview of 3-5 indicators,
- A full, comprehensive assessment,
- A policy brief,
- Or a first carbon footprint of your university.
While UniSAF is a full framework that covers everything you need to conduct a comprehensive assessment, it can also be used in combination with other frameworks.
TU Kaiserslautern published a sustainability report based on UniSAF and GRI G4
Why you should assess sustainability at your university
Evaluating the sustainability performance of your university offers you multiple benefits:
- Create transparency around your organisation’s sustainability impacts,
- Start a conversation with key stakeholders,
- Set a baseline to measure changes in the future,
- And identify actions to improve your organisation’s sustainability performance.
Benefits of UniSAF
UniSAF is a comprehensive tool that is:
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- Specific to universities,
- Easy to use,
- Flexible,
- Actionable,
- Free of charge.
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In this way, UniSAF offers a great alternative to frameworks that aren’t specific to the higher education sector or that were developed by academics with a strong theoretical focus.
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Get started in 6 steps
To get started with assessing the sustainability of your university, you should go through these steps:
- Set your goals before you start
- Identify issues and choose indicators
- Collect the necessary data
- Analyse the data critically
- State key observations
- Communicate in a way that people will listen
Check out this blog post to learn about these steps in detail.
Open-source license
We strongly believe in open-source change-making as a great strategy to spread sustainability innovations faster and to collaborate with more people in improving them. That is why UniSAF is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
You can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially – as long as you give appropriate credit to us and distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
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Photo by the sustainability office at TU Kaiserslautern.