Originally published in UC Davis Dateline

The University of California, Davis, is the “greenest” campus in the United States for the ninth year in a row, according to the 2024 UI GreenMetric World University Rankings published today (Dec. 12).

The rankings, established by the University of Indonesia in 2010, also place UC Davis as the world’s seventh most sustainable university, the 12th consecutive year the campus has been in the world’s top 10.

“At UC Davis, sustainability is not just a goal,” Chancellor Gary S. May said in a video prepared for the awards ceremony in Brazil. “It is a core value woven into everything we do.”

He highlighted the early success of the Big Shift, a massive construction project to enable the campus to heat buildings with electricity instead of natural gas and decarbonize its utility system.

“The Big Shift is making a real impact on our campus and serves as a model for how other universities can address climate change in their operations,” May said.

“Our campus functions as a living laboratory allowing our faculty to collaborate with students and operational teams and transform theory into practice.”

The annual rankings consider universities’ policies and performance in the categories of setting and infrastructure (15%), energy and climate change (21%), waste (18%), water (10%), transportation (18%), and education and research (18%). This year’s rankings added some metrics to account for the social, cultural and economic aspects of sustainability.

A total of 1,477 universities from 95 countries participated in the rankings.

UC Davis and rankings

A world-class university, UC Davis is highly ranked for how it transforms students’ lives, the impact of its research, the excellence of its academic programs, sustainability and more. The university performs self-evaluations and also appreciates the value of third-party assessments. However, ranking methods vary, change over time and can be subjective. UC Davis focuses on those rankings that most closely align with its mission and values — including serving the public good, inclusiveness and equity, and social mobility — and in national rankings looks most closely at its standing among public universities. UC Davis encourages prospective students and their families to weigh rankings among other factors in their college decision, talk with counselors and UC Davis admissions advisors, and, if possible, visit the campus.