Development of metric evaluation for sustainable University

Abstract

Awareness towards the enviroment by the university community has started since 1970 through various activities such as ‘Earth Day’celebration. The aim of such activities was to make sure that the university emphasized on the sustainanble practices among the community in preserving the enviroment. The initiative to transform the local university to a sustainable university has been carried out by a number of research universities, namely; UTM, UKM, USM, UPM, and UM. This can be seen in various efforts carried out by the university such as setting up research centre solely for the enviroment; carrying out activities for sustainable university, forming sustainability policy and etc. However all these efforts would be furtile if a metric was not used to measure the level of sustainability to evaluate through practices at the university. A research has been done to develop a metric evaluation for sustainable university that has characteristics of sustainability. This research is carried out by interviewing 13 sustainability experts who are well-werse in the field of social economy and enviroment. The outcome of the research are the characteristics and sub elements of a sustainable university together with a comprehensive metric evaluation. This metric evaluation will function as a bench mark to observe the initiative level of sustainability at UTM as well as other local universities. This metric would guide universities to assess the level of sustainability of the university.