Sustainable and responsible university
The Ģֱ is committed to promoting the principles, goals, and forms of action defined in UNIFI’s (Council of Finnish Universities) theses on sustainable development and responsibility, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. We have signed the Global Climate Emergency Letter of more than 8,000 universities and higher education institutions,thus committing to the goals of the declaration. We are also one of the Founding Universities of Nature Positive Universities Alliance. Our experts play an important role in scientific panels and university networks.
The Times Higher Education Impact Rankings assess universities against the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Ģֱ has ranked within the best 100 universities at SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production (84), SDG 13: Climate Action (54), SDG 14: Life below Water (82) and SDG 15: Life on Land (72).
All who graduate from the Ģֱ should have a basic competence in planetary well-being and to be able to apply its principles in their fields. We offer Planetary Well-being online studies at the Open University of the Ģֱ that are available free of charge to everyone. These MOOC studies cover themes such as climate change, biodiversity loss and resource wisdom. JYU Open University offers also other courses such as Nature Under Threat online studies that are completely free-of-charge.
Planetary well-being
JYU.Wisdom is an open and transdisciplinary community whose mission is to excel in the research and education of planetary well-being. Wisdom serves as a cross-disciplinary community for sustainability and responsibility experts at the Ģֱ.
The roadmap to planetary well-being, approved by the University Board of the Ģֱ 10.6.2022 as an environmental programme, guides the operations of the Ģֱ. A separate action plan has been approved by the Rector to implement the roadmap, but is in Finnish only.
Planetary well-being is a state where the integrity of Earth system and ecosystem processes remains unimpaired to a degree that species and populations can persist to the future and organisms have the opportunity to achieve well-being
Accessibility, equality and equity
Our university's goal is to provide a socially and culturally safe environment in which harassment, inappropriate treatment, discrimination, bullying, hate speech or other inappropriate conduct is not tolerated in any encounter. As a community, we dismantle discriminating and restricting structures and standards. Our university supports its community’s comprehensive wellbeing when working and studying through various development measures and operating models.
The aim of the Ģֱ is to achieve a climate neutral investment portfolio by 2035. An intermediate goal is to reduce the CO2 emissions of the Ģֱ’s investments by 30% from the level of 2019 by 2025 and by 70% by 2030. Currenlty the university is selecting the biodiversity goals for its investments. Our partners (investment managers) are committed to following responsible practices. For example, ESG (environmental, social, governance) metrics are paid attention to and developed as part of investment activities in the management of funds. All the University’s investment managers are members of the United Nations-supported PRI (Principles for Responsible Investment) organisation.
Sustainability reporting
We produce a yearly sustainability report. Before the first sustainability report from 2021, reports on the Ģֱ's biodiversity- and climate footprints (2019 and 2020) were published by Wisdom.
