Benchmarking tools for assessing and tracking sustainability in higher educational institutions

Purpose – The University of Saskatchewan (UofS) has indentified five areas of campus life critical to improving the university's sustainability performance: education, research, operations, governance, and community engagement. In recognition of the need to track and assess the university's performance in all of these areas, a study was conducted to identify an effective sustainability‐benchmarking tool for the UofS. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach – In order to indentify an effective benchmarking tool for assessing sustainability for the context of the UofS, two academic‐focused tools and two tools with a broader scope were reviewed. The academic tools are Sustainability Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) and the Campus Sustainability Assessment Framework (CSAF), while the general tools are the College of Sustainability Report Card (CSRC) and the Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System (STARS). Each tool was rated on the basis of 27 questions developed to direc...