The state of sustainability reporting at Canadian universities
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the state of sustainability reporting in Canada's higher education sector, while understanding who is reporting on sustainability performance, how is information being reported, and what is being reported. Design/methodology/approach – A framework with ten categories and 56 indicators based on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines and campus sustainability assessment tools was developed to analyse the contents of a cross‐sectional sample of sustainability reports published by Canada's largest 25 universities (by student enrolment). Each author analysed two to three reports. Evidences were checked for accuracy by a different author and finally discussed in a focus group. Findings – The analysis has shown that sustainability reporting is an uncommon and diverse practice at Canadian universities. Primarily under the coordination of sustainability offices or students, seven universities published sustainability reports in the analyzed period (2006‐2008). While all reports shared a non‐integrated indicators framework, a variety of approaches were used in the selection of indicators. Reports generally had limited scopes emphasizing eco‐efficiency. The potential value of current documents as a tool to inform sustainability‐oriented decisions is limited. Practical implications – Findings are particularly relevant to university administrators and sustainability offices planning to publish or enhance sustainability reports. The paper also explores the challenges of applying the GRI guidelines to the higher education sector. Originality/value – Most descriptive studies on sustainability reporting have addressed large multinational corporations. This paper is one of the first to address the incipient practices of higher education institutions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it