Green Gown Awards 2016 – Sustainability Reporting – Plymouth University – Winner

This is Plymouth University’s fourth Sustainability Report, and our first report using the Global Reporting Initiative framework. The report is aimed at stakeholders who have an interest in our sustainability performance and reflects the University’s whole institutional approach to sustainability incorporating operations, research and teaching and learning.

The report provides a review of sustainability performance over two years from July 2013 to July 2015, detailing our aims and performance against our key environmental, economic and social sustainability ambitions. The reporting process provides us with an opportunity to monitor progress against our KPIs and to disclose publicly on our performance as well as key successes and challenges for sustainability.

Plymouth University Sustainability Report 2016

Top 3 learnings

1 We chose to apply the GRI framework for sustainability reporting to provide a robust platform for disclosing our performance, and this required a greater time commitment for reporting

2 The report was written with full approval and involvement of the Vice-Chancellor, ensuring full support of the University Executive

3 The report is long due to fully disclosing against the GRI framework, and we are going to follow up with a summary report to provide a quick overview of our performance and entice readers to the read full report.