MU achieved its strongest results in sustainable water management and conservation, where it scored almost full marks. It also performed particularly well in education and research, institutional governance and digitalisation, sustainable transport, and waste management.
Masaryk University has ranked among the world’s top 100 universities in the UI GreenMetric sustainability ranking, thanks in particular to its strong performance in education and research, institutional governance and digitalisation, and sustainable transport.
A record 2,016 universities from 110 countries took part in this year’s assessment. With its 97th-place finish, MU ranked among the top 5 per cent of participating institutions. The ranking evaluates 60 indicators across seven thematic areas: setting and infrastructure; energy and climate change; waste; water; transportation; education and research; and, newly this year, institutional governance and digitalisation.
MU achieved its strongest results in sustainable water management and conservation, where it scored almost full marks. In the new category covering institutional governance and digitalisation, it achieved 91 per cent of the maximum possible score. Its strong overall performance also reflects long-term measures in the areas of sustainable transport and waste management.
“I am delighted with our position among the world’s top 100 universities and our first-place ranking among Czech universities. I have long maintained that we should strive to be the very best in every aspect of our work. It is our moral duty. In my view, sustainability is not merely a current trend or a buzzword, but above all a synonym for responsibility. Responsibility for resources, whether natural or financial, is also, for me, a path to greater efficiency. This begins with strategic management and, ideally, is reflected in the everyday attitudes and behaviour of us all.
“For these reasons, for example, we have, for the first time in the university’s history, a vice-rector on the university’s executive board whose portfolio explicitly includes sustainability. This ranking is a great success, and today we can rightly be proud of Masaryk University,” says MU Rector Martin Bareš, commenting on the university’s ranking result.
Seven Czech higher education institutions participated in this year’s ranking. Masaryk University ranked first in the Czech Republic (97th in the world), followed by the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague (209th), the University of Hradec Králové (431st), Palacký University Olomouc (448th), VSB – Technical University of Ostrava (458th), Tomas Bata University in Zlín (549th), and Mendel University in Brno (679th).
The top three positions worldwide were taken by Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, Umwelt-Campus Birkenfeld (Trier University of Applied Sciences) in Germany, and the University of São Paulo in Brazil.
European universities dominate the ranking’s top ten.