Sustainability reports for universities

Purpose - The paper presents some methodological notes for universities to support the writing of their own sustainability report. Sustainability reports are documents organizations use to report the company's identity, governance, and values, as well as the impact of everyday activities and topics considered as relevant to sustainable development (Global Reporting Initiative, 2013). In the last two decades the commitment of universities to sustainable development has strongly grown (Adomssent et al. 2007, Velazquez et al. 2006, Waas et al. 2010) and today an increasing number of universities, although still limited, periodically publish a sustainability report (Ceulemans et al. 2014, del Mar Alonso-Almeida et al. 2014, Townsend and Barrett 2013). Extant reporting standards and guidelines (e.g. GRI-G4 of the Global Reporting Initiative) seem to be mainly developed for companies (Lozano, 2006) and often neglect the description of methodological aspects to be adopted for the reporting process, especially in the case of universities. The lack of clear guidelines can affect the quality of the reports and make the comparison of different reports hard. Design/methodology/approach - To develop the methodological notes, we reviewed the literature and analysed the most adopted reporting standards and guidelines. We also analysed the sustainability reports of a sample of ten universities. The sample includes reports from the GRI disclosure database. The report analysis was carried out to assess (i) the standard adopted, if any, (ii) the reporting process carried out, i. e. the set of activities and the procedures performed to develop and publish the sustainability report, and (iii) the information reported. As to the reporting process, the activities related to the identification and interaction with stakeholders as well as the activities performed to identify which indicators to be used are analysed and discussed. Originality/value - The proposed methodological notes integrate those provided by the GRI. We also identified some issues that remain as open problems and should be further analyzed. Practical implications - The paper outcomes can be used by universities that already publish a sustainability report to improve the reporting process. The outcomes can also be used by universities, and any kind of organizations, which intend to start the process of sustainability reporting.