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Metrics for Sustainable Development

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  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education

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Definition

Metrics for sustainable development are indicators that allow to measure, compare, and report on efforts toward sustainable development integration.

Introduction

Many higher education institutions have started to implement sustainability in their activities; this includes in educational process as well as in operation of their facilities. In order to enable the path toward sustainability, sustainability assessment tools have become a crucial element (Lambrechts 2015) as they allow the creation of strategies and planning toward a sustainable university. Shriberg (2002) defined sustainability assessment as a way to measure and compare HEIs to each other in terms of their efforts toward SD integration (through the use of SA tools and frameworks).

As indicated by Lozano (2006a), there are three main approaches for assessing and reporting sustainability in organizations: accounts, narrative assessments, and indicator-based. Each of them has strengths and weaknesses, but “in...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Project Management, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Elena Pertceva & Maria Zyulyaeva

Authors
  1. Elena Pertceva
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  2. Maria Zyulyaeva
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maria Zyulyaeva .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Life Sciences, World Sustainable Development Research and Transfer Centre, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany

    Walter Leal Filho

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Economics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Madhavi Venkatesan

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Pertceva, E., Zyulyaeva, M. (2019). Metrics for Sustainable Development. In: Leal Filho, W. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11352-0_289

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