The People & Planet rankings are better, imperfect, and working.

Each year, universities submit data to QS for them to review and create their sustainability rankings. This year, Imperial ranked 7th. It’s a nice process, but it’s not remotely public. Whilst QS does share their criteria, they don’t share how each university did in any granularity and they don’t share data they were sent. This is in sharp contrast to People & Planet’s methodology. They create provisional rankings using publicly available information and then share these with universities so that they can appeal any mistakes or add any additional information they may have. It’s a process run by volunteers who care about creating change through these rankings. Each university’s score is broken down by People & Planet’s criteria, and their evidence is usually referenced.

An editorial in Felix #1838 discusses the problems with the People & Planet rankings. I agree about the problems, and rankings certainly aren’t good ways of making decisions. However, I want to add: Imperial’s People & Planet ranking should be better. The College’s scores of 39% in investment and 23% in careers, for example, betray its continued partnerships with the fossil fuel and arms industries. I think we can do better than 76th overall in an ethics and environment ranking. Imperial’s score is up 10% from last year, pushing from “worst 2:2 university” to “decent 2:2 university”. I want to see the changes that led to this continue. Having spoken to some of our sustainability staff, the People & Planet rankings are a motivating factor for further action on sustainability. In this way, People & Planet are doing exactly what they wanted to do with their rankings.