Edinburgh Napier University

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an urgent call for action by all countries - developed and developing - in a global partnership. They recognise that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth – all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.

As the Home of Difference Makers with a purpose to 'Deliver high quality education and research to add value to the social, cultural and economic capital of our communities and shape their development' we are already supporting the worldwide effort to build a better future for people and planet. We do this through our educational approach, research and innovation, our local and international networks, and partnerships, as well as through our own operations and extensive community of students, staff and alumni.

We made our first submission to the THE Impact Rankings to benefit from independent assessment and benchmarking of our approach and impact. Edinburgh Napier scored 76.1 out of 100, achieving an overall rank of 301-400 out of 1,963 participating institutions.

Our top-scoring SDGs were:

• SDG17 Partnership for the Goals - 82.1  (Rank 201-300)
• SDG11 Sustainable Cities & Communities - 76.2  (Rank 101-200)
• SDG3 Good Health & Wellbeing - 71.0  (Rank 301-400)

Please select each Sustainable Development Goal below to read more about our existing work and plans for the future. As we are still in the process of mapping our work, any goal which does not yet have substantial information attached will instead direct to the UNSDG website for further reading.

We are proud signatories of the UNSDG Accord, the UKRI Concordat for Sustainability and the Edinburgh Climate Compact, exemplifying outwardly our commitment to embedding environmental sustainability and the SDGs in our policy and practice, as well as reporting on progress and sharing learnings.

We have completed the Sustainability Leadership Scorecard (SLS) developed by the Association for University Directors of Estates (AUDE) and the EAUC. The SLS provides a purposeful structure to measure progress against the 17 UNSDGs.

We are currently on a journey of building internal and external awareness of our existing SDG impact, while focusing on embedding the SDGs further through our planning, processes, policy and communications to both enhance and share our impact. For example, colleagues within our Business School have reviewed all published academic and research activity and worked collaboratively to report this in an ‘SDG Dashboard’ developed by Haub School of Business at Saint Joseph’s University.

The Business School also published their inaugural Principles for Resource Management Education (PRME) ‘Sharing Information on Progress Report’ in January 2023. The report provides a fascinating insight into business leadership and environmental sustainability.

Looking across the whole University, our ENhance Curriculum Framework – already includes a thematic focus on sustainability, which means all our programmes are reviewed to ensure sustainability and the SDGs are embedded – with toolkits and case studies available to support academics as they develop and enhance their curricula. The next step will be to tag our programmes to give students clarity about which SDGs their degree programmes will have a predominant focus on.

We have an interdisciplinary module, ‘Achieving Sustainability,’ which was developed by academics across five of our six schools and is offered as an option to students across the University.  We are also looking to include SDG tagging in Worktribe, the research management system used by the University, to help us audit, share and drive further impact through our research and innovation.