2024 Times Higher Education Impact Rankings announced

The University of Leeds has been ranked 52nd globally for its contribution towards achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) according to the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings 2024 published on 12 June 2024.

With almost 2,000 participating universities in more than 100 countries, the University achieved an overall score of 91.7% for its contribution to the 17 SDGs across research, teaching, operations, and outreach.     

The University’s best scoring SDG was for SDG17 (Partnerships for the goals) at 94.2%. Excellent scores were also received for SDG15 (Life on land) with score of 91.8%, SDG10 (Reduced inequalities) with a score of 84.4%, and SDG11 (Sustainable cities and communities) with 83.2%.   

Thom Cooper, Head of Sustainability, said "Participating in these rankings provides us with an opportunity to benchmark with our peers. It gives a measure of our progress and of course helps us to identify areas of focus for improvement as we begin to develop our new sustainability strategy for Leeds this year.

"The results are a positive reflection of how seriously we take our responsibility to sustainability at Leeds, and demonstrate the incredible commitment to this that we see every day across our University community."

Making a positive difference in the world

The Impact Ranking considers our contribution towards each of the 17 SDGs across research, teaching, operations and outreach, and is an important measure in the University Key Performance Indicator (KPI) ‘making a positive difference in the world’. It provides an indication of where and how we are having an impact across the breadth of sustainability issues - from climate action to good health & wellbeing, and from social impact to biodiversity.  

The work to enter the Impact Rankings is led by the Sustainability Service with hundreds of lines of data, case studies and evidence collated from across the University. Thank you to everyone that supported this process.  

Over the coming weeks we will be working with colleagues to analyse and digest the output of the Impact Rankings. This will help us to better understand how we can increase our impact on the SDGs, including within operational areas such as catering and food, water use and efficiency, energy use and emissions, waste reduction and recycling, and biodiversity and land management. 

You can explore some of the ways that the University is contributing to the SDGs on our website, and you can view the full THE Impact ranking results on the Times Higher Education website.   

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

We use the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework to guide our activity. Our work as the Sustainability Service is linked to all of the SDGs.

Find out more about our impact on the SDGs.