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The Sustainability Team needs your help to collate information for the Times Higher Education University Impact Rankings.

Each year, the team gathers data from across the institution for the rankings, which measure the contribution of universities to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Data is collected and submitted in November for the previous calendar year’s reporting period, then the results are published the following June.

In the 2024 rankings, released last month, the University of Sussex was ranked between 101 – 200 of universities across the world. This was based on the results for the 2021/22 reporting year.

How everyone across the University can play their part

The Sustainability Team is now collecting and reviewing evidence from August 2022 to July 2023 for the November 2024 submission. 

Adam Batchelor, the University’s new Senior Sustainability Policy and Performance Manager, says his team has been emailing staff to ask for relevant data on a variety of topics – and explains why it is so important that we get your support.

“Monitoring and benchmarking our performance in these important strategic areas allows us to improve and maximise our impact, so it is vital that everyone across the University helps with the collation of information before the end of July,” he says.

“We have contacted a number of colleagues already asking you to submit the data to APlanet – simply click on ‘See all requests’ to view the relevant questions about your area.”

For a full step-by-step explanation of how to submit your data this month, please take a look at this post on Viva Engage.

How it works

Participation in the overall ranking requires universities to submit data to at least four SDGs, with SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals) a mandatory goal that all universities are judged against. THE then ranks universities using a combined score from the three SDGs on which they scored most highly, along with their score on SDG 17. 

The score for each SDG is assigned for performance in four distinct areas: 

• Research, including academic citation scoring
• Stewardship, related to our policies and operational performance data
• Outreach, based upon our impact on the wider community
• Teaching, examining how sustainability is embedded in our curriculum

Get in touch to find out more 

If you have any questions about the submission process, please email the Sustainability Team at sustainable@sussex.ac.uk – you can also subscribe to the Sustainable Sussex newsletter to stay updated.

We are also looking for relevant case studies linked to one of the SDGs to support our submissions – if you have an example of some work related to sustainability, whether academic or PS, please contact the Sustainability Team. 

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