Vista of UCC campus
University College Cork (UCC) has been placed third for its efforts to green its campus and reduce its carbon footprint in the latest UI GreenMetric World University Rankings.
The system, which has been ranking universities and institutes across the globe since 2010 for their campus sustainability programmes, is an initiative developed by the Universitas Indonesia.
In the 2012 world rankings, 215 universities and institutes from 49 countries took part.
The overall winner was the University of Connecticut in the US, with the University of Nottingham in the UK taking second place.
UCC was ranked third in the listing and was the only Irish educational institute to make it into the top 50. It scored highly across all categories, which included water usage, waste management, transportation, education and green statistics.
University of Limerick came in at 58 on the list, Dublin City University came in at 80th position, while Dublin Institute of Technology was ranked 198th on the list.
UCC president Dr Michael Murphy said the result acknowledged the approach taken by the university in the area of campus sustainability.
Last October, UCC also entered into an agreement with the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) under its Public Sector Energy Partnership programme, with the aim of achieving energy savings of 33pc by 2020.
The university also has an energy programme in place and has been awarded the IS0 50001 standard in energy management.
In terms of its teaching agenda, UCC has just launched a new module on ‘global climate change’ whereby 20 researchers from the university will be giving students an overview of the complexities of climate change.
Prof Patrick Fitzpatrick, head of the College of Science, Engineering and Food Science, at UCC, will be one of the panelists at the Green Growth Forum that will take place at the Convention Centre in Dublin on 25 January next.
