The scores are in: Sustainability Leadership Scorecard annual report launched

18th June 2025

New analysis reveals key progress areas and ongoing challenges for college and university sustainability performance

The annual report of the Sustainability Leadership Scorecard (SLS), delivered by EAUC in partnership with AUDE, has been released today.

This year’s report draws on self-assessment data submitted by 128 universities and colleges to the SLS online platform.

Most notably, the number of institutions submitting scores has increased by 42% compared to the previous reporting period in 2023, demonstrating a growing commitment amongst universities and colleges to benchmark and track whole-institutional sustainability performance.

Scoring for self-assessment and sector wide insights 

Participating institutions assess themselves in 18 key sustainability areas using a scale of 0 to 4, where 4 represents best practice. These scores are aggregated to provide an overall picture of performance in each area. This enables institutions to internally monitor their progress while allowing EAUC and AUDE to identify sector-level trends, as detailed in the annual report.

This year, nearly half of the participating institutions achieved a ranking level of Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Platinum.  It is fantastic to see platform users tracking positive progress in meeting their sustainability goals.

Top performing areas

This year’s results reveal that institutions came closest to meeting their target scores in the follow areas:

• Health and wellbeing
• Leadership
• Risk

Areas for development

Meanwhile, the data shows that institutions are furthest from achieving their target scores in the following areas:
 

• Climate change adaptation
• Learning and teaching
• Water

Next steps

Recognising that targeted support is required to enable institutions to progress in the lowest-performing areas, the report signposts to a range of relevant resources, tools and guides including the upcoming Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Guide, due to released by AUDE and Arup in summer 2025.

The full report with scores can be downloaded here.

The Sustainability Leadership Scorecard platform is free for AUDE and EAUC members.

Find out more and view your organisation's scores, log-in to the platform or register as a new user.

For general enquiries and more information about the report, please contact: [email protected]

Image: Lancaster University library. Credit: AUDE.