How do you make a campus more sustainable? These universities did it with GoPros and selling leftovers
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Using GoPros to monitor tree seedlings and tackling campus food insecurity through leftovers are among the initiatives that helped propel two Canadian universities into the top 10 in a U.K. ranking of efforts at post-secondary schools worldwide to meet United Nations goals for a sustainable planet.
Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., and the University of Alberta are among the top 10 institutions in the world when it comes to advancing UN goals such as ending poverty and protecting the planet, according to Times Higher Education's 2025 Impact Rankings.
The 17 sustainable development goals, established by the UN in 2015 as a call to action to tackle pervasive global issues and ensure prosperity across the globe, range from ending world hunger to taking climate action and ensuring access to health and education.
The goals were unanimously adopted by member countries at the time, but the UN warned last year that less than one-fifth of the targets are on track to be achieved by the deadline in 2030.
Times Higher Education's Impact Rankings is the only ranking system that looks at how universities are helping to address these UN goals through research and education, as well as campus and community programs, according to the publication.
"Universities are actually uniquely positioned to help solve the sustainable development goals," Ellie Bothwell, rankings editor at Times Higher Education, told CBC News.
Not only can they drive research efforts to find solutions and teach the next generation of problem-solvers, she said, but universities also collaborate heavily with surrounding communities locally, nationally and on campus.
"They're sort of mini-cities in a way themselves."
The rankings, released Tuesday, assessed more than 2,500 universities from 130 countries and territories for their sustainability progress, including 24 from Canada.
Queen's University was the highest-scoring Canadian university, tying for sixth place overall with Arizona State University. Programs reducing food waste and insecurity on campus and research into green supercomputers and lowering emissions are among the factors keeping them ahead of the pack, Queen's says.
The University of Alberta also made it to the top 10, at eighth place. Seven Canadian universities were ranked in the global top 50, the most for any country after Australia, which netted nine.
"Canadian universities perform really strongly," Bothwell said.
"Lots of [Canadian universities] were among the first to sort of commit to be carbon neutral or to publish really quite detailed sustainability reports on their own emissions. So, yeah, we see Canada among those leading the way on this."
To be included in the rankings, which have been conducted since 2019, universities submit data each year on their progress toward the goals.
Their progress in advancing a specific goal, such as ending poverty, for example, is scored using factors such as the number of research publications universities put out on that topic, courses and campus programs addressing it, and partnerships with governments, non-governmental organizations and other post-secondary institutions.
Canadian universities scored high in several individual categories. The University of Alberta was ranked first in the industry, innovation and infrastructure goal along with 11 other universities, while the University of Victoria came in second for advancing sustainable cities and communities.
How Canadian universities are pursuing sustainability
At Queen's University, the goals are considered in every department, said principal and vice-chancellor Patrick Deane.
"Whatever we do here needs to be green. It needs to be properly responsive to the sustainable goals," he told CBC News.
"[It's] critically important for the health of societies, the health of individuals and the health of the planet that we make progress on all of these. So it's a matter of urgency."
Queen's University is the only Canadian institution to have been in the top 10 of the rankings for five years straight, and jumped two places this year compared to last year's ranking. It's a "vindication for the work" it has been doing, Deane said.
In the individual goals, Queen's University was ranked second in two: peace, justice and strong institutions; and furthering sustainable oceans. Queen's came first globally for addressing the goal of zero hunger.
One of the programs highlighting the university's commitment to addressing food insecurity, according to Deane, is its Providing Equal Access, Changing Hunger (PEACH) Market, started in 2022, where leftover food from Queen's hospitality services is then sold on a pay-what-you-can model.
Queen's is also developing a software-automated aeroponic vertical farm, a type of farming that uses less land and water.
Deane said that as researchers look to expand supercomputing and artificial intelligence capacity in Canada, Queen's is also working on more environmentally friendly and efficient supercomputers to cut the ecological cost of energy-hungry AI.
The rankings have made the university "much more deliberate about this work," he said. "And I think that's what's required if we're going to get where we need to be on these goals."
At the University of Alberta, graduate student Sarun Khadka found that GoPros could monitor tree seedlings as accurately as humans, potentially making monitoring more "efficient and accessible," a spokesperson told CBC News.
Other examples of how the university is addressing the sustainability goals include a new course to help future urban planners find practical tools for climate adaptation and a new interdisciplinary research centre focused on water safety.
Universities in Asia saw advances in sustainable development in the latest ranking, Bothwell said, with a university from South Korea (Kyungpook National University) and one from Indonesia (Universitas Airlangga) entering the top 10 for the first time.
U.S. has 1 university in top 50
"Asian universities now lead 10 out of the 17 individual ... rankings, up from five last year," Bothwell said. "That's something that's been really pleasing to see."
The U.S., despite being known as a research powerhouse, had only one university in the global top 50, compared to three in last year's ranking.
"It's striking that there are relatively low numbers of U.S. universities, given the size of the sector," Bothwell said.
The U.S. formally withdrew its support of the goals earlier this year, with Edward Heartney, a minister-counsellor at the U.S. mission to the United Nations, stating at a March meeting of the General Assembly that the U.S. "rejects and denounces" the shared UN goals.
With global progress toward the goals already slowed by widespread disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic and global conflicts, and the United Nations warning that progress on more than one-third of the goals had " stalled or regressed" as of 2024, it's an uphill battle, but one Bothwell says post-secondary institutions are still fighting.
"There is certainly skepticism about whether nations will be able to reach the goals," Bothwell said.
"I would say though that I think that universities are showing amazing resilience and momentum and continuing to make an impact, striving to keep progress going even when maybe nationally the governments aren't focusing as much on this as they could."
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