The University of California, Davis, is the “most sustainable” higher education institution in the United States, according to the UI GreenMetric World University Rankings.
The rankings from the University of Indonesia looked at 780 schools around the world. It considers numerous factors such as energy and climate change, setting and infrastructure, transportation, waste, water, and education and research.
UC Davis says in a news release that it was ranked third in the worldwide rankings, after Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. The California campus was the only U.S. institution in the top 10.
“Our investments on and off campus continue to pay dividends in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions,” says Camille Kirk, director of sustainability at UC Davis.
In 2018, clean, renewable sources accounted for 59 percent of the electricity used on the Davis campus: 14 percent on-site (solar farm) and 45 percent off-site (two solar farms in Fresno County). Of the rest, 14 percent came from large hydropower (carbon neutral but not renewable) and 27 percent from the Western Area Power Administration.
