Dr Zareen Pervez Bharucha, Senior Research Fellow

Anglia Ruskin University

I’m a social scientist with an interest in bringing people together, working on complex problems and understanding the stories we tell about sustainability. My work is usually focused on environmental change abroad. But it never occurred to me that I could apply everything I’ve learnt about sustainability to the place where I work.

I co-founded Anglia Ruskin’s Sustainable Development Goals Working Group just before the pandemic, to bring together like-minded academics who wanted to work on making a change in our own university. I proposed that we should begin by benchmarking our work against the sustainable development goals, to get a broad picture of what we do well, and where we could do better.

To do this, in 2020 I led the data collection for our inaugural submission to the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings. I have coordinated this exercise in each subsequent year. In 2022 we ranked in 1st place for SDG3 - health and wellbeing. Getting these insights has allowed us as an institution to showcase our strengths, and also provided a solid base to involve our whole community in setting an exciting and transformative agenda.  

Top 3 Learnings

1. Sustainability researchers can make a difference to how sustainability is embedded in their own Universities. 
2. Benchmarking against the SDGs tells a great sustainability story. 
3. We have discovered we are doing sustainability well! Telling this story makes us do better!