University of Sharjah
PRE-2: Points of Distinction

One of the missions of the Sustainability Office is to enhance awareness on sustainability issues and to foster a sustainability culture among the students, staff, and faculty members as well as the local community. This has been implemented through the organization of various awareness campaigns and programs. In compliance with that, the University of Sharjah has started an initiative under the name of “Sustainability Year 2020” and during the past 3 years, over 100 events focusing on the promotion of sustainability culture have been planned and organized. One of the major awareness campaigns was the “Acting on Plastic” -student-focused initiative for the collection and recycling of plastics which included two competitions for students aiming to collect the largest amount of plastic packages from several places at the university and the reuse and recycling of plastics. The objective of this campaign, among other things, was to encourage the student community to be part of the environmental and social awareness system pertaining to the consumption of plastics at the University of Sharjah.

The University of Sharjah aims to be at the forefront of sustainable practices, besides inspiring and educating future generations, by creating awareness (via scientific evidence) on the benefits of producing high-yield soil for organic farming. In our pursuit to transform waste into rich manure, the University of Sharjah (UOS), through the team of Linking Education and Farming (LEAF) of the Sustainable Circle, has developed a strategy towards mobilizing all the biodegradable waste generated within the Medical campus. The leader of the “LEAF” project, Dr. Anu V Ranade (currently working as an Associate Professor in the College of Medicine UOS) started this sustainable project as a pilot study on 19th October 2019, with the aim of achieving ZERO waste within the campus. To this end, a ‘community composting hub’ has been developed in the College of Medicine and about 150kg of high yield soil was produced, within a short span of three months, by using biodegradable kitchen waste such as vegetable peels and waste coffee grounds. In addition to that, UOS introduced a “sustainable garden” project to change the production and consumption patterns from unsustainable sources to more sustainable ones, to address water and air pollution, and to protect and manage natural resources to prevent desertification, environmental degradation, and degradation of biodiversity. This initiative has been implemented with the active participation of the entire UOS community, including the students, staff, faculty members, and their family members, in the cultivation of specific areas of the sustainable garden using modern and intelligent technologies to reduce the use of water, fertilizers, and energy.

The University of Sharjah has participated in the UI GreenMetric World University Rankings (UIGWUR) consecutively in the last four years from 2017 to 2020 and maintained the first place in the UAE for the fourth year in a row.
Moreover, the University of Sharjah has been ranked among the first 100 universities globally in the Water and Education categories in the 2020 ‘UI GreenMetric World University Rankings’.
In 2018, UOS was ranked 481th in the water category and 324th in the Education category.
The adaptation of the continuous improvement methodology enabled UOS to identify the areas of strengths and weaknesses to ensure the preservation of the outstanding results and continuous improvement.
As a result, in 2020, UOS ranked 50th in the water category globally, which marks a 208% rise in the score, and 99th in the Education category, which is an 87.5% improvement in the score.
The efforts made in the education category mainly focused on training, educating, and preparing future leaders, scholars, workers, and professionals, as well as students to understand and address sustainability challenges and to offer more sustainability-related courses to prepare students to lead society towards sustainability. UOS has allocated funding to encourage research related to sustainability as follows:
Total fund dedicated to sustainability research in 2017-2018 = $3,945,800 (US$).
Total fund dedicated to sustainability research in 2018-2019 = $5,584,162 (US$).
Total fund dedicated to sustainability research in 2019-2020 = $4,210,402 (US$).
The average monetary amount per annum for the last 3 years dedicated to sustainability research = $4,580,121 (US$).