THE Impact Rankings 2022
UVic is proud to be recognized in the 2022 Times Higher Education Impact Rankings for our innovative and impactful research, and for campus operations that are ecologically and socially responsible.
In our teaching, research and operations—and through our local, national and international partnerships—the University of Victoria proudly supports and works to advance the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“At UVic we care deeply about what the UN SDGs stand for and their calls to action to create an equitable planet and a sustainable and inclusive economy. We know our university community can make a difference with each innovative research program, campus project and community engagement we undertake.”
—UVic President Kevin Hall
Top 5 SDG rankings
UVic is in the top five colleges and universities around the world in advancing and living up to the commitments of three UN SDG areas, as rated by the 2022 Times Higher Education Impact Rankings:
- 2nd for SDG 13: Climate action
- 5th for SDG 14: Life below water
- 2nd for SDG 15: Life on land
We ranked 12th overall out of 1,406 institutions, including 24 in Canada.
SDG 13: Climate action
Taking urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
Students, faculty, staff and researchers in all fields are committed to ensuring a sustainable future for our world, and they approach that challenge from all angles. Helping remote communities switch to renewable energy from diesel. Discovering evidence of the climate’s effect on marine ecosystems to help protect this precious resource. Building on Indigenous ecological knowledge to identify and protect species at risk through environmental DNA. Placing students in sustainability jobs so they can put classroom theory to practice.
SDG 14: Life below water
Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
Marine ecologist and conservation biologist Julia Baum spent the early part of her career studying the impacts of commercial fishing on oceanic sharks and assessing the health of global fisheries. But a pivotal exploration near the Earth’s equator changed her research focus forever.
The expeditions were at the Pacific Ocean coral atoll of Kiritimati or Christmas Island during and in the aftermath of the 2015-2016 El Niño. Heat stress from that El Niño event triggered the third-ever global coral bleaching event, causing mass coral bleaching and mortality on reefs around the world. Christmas Island, where Baum has worked for more than a decade, was the event’s epicentre.
What Baum saw struck her to the core. “It was a wake-up call. Up until then, I believed that overfishing was the greatest threat to the world’s oceans,” she says.
Seeing a marine heatwave destroy an entire ecosystem in just a few months confirmed that there were larger, more devasting forces at play. I knew then I needed to transform my research program to centre on climate change.
—Julia Baum, UVic marine ecologist and conservation biologist
SDG 15: Life on land
Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
UVic students and faculty are engaged in extraordinary fieldwork and lab research to document and better protect healthy ecosystems around the world, working closely with the communities who most directly rely on their region’s ecology. Whether that means complex competition for land resources between people and elephants in Asia, or interconnections between land-based and water-dependent bear and wolf populations in Canada’s coastal communities, UVic research is advancing scientific knowledge and supporting solutions that serve people, land, sustainable food supplies and species health across the planet.
Top 25 SDG Rankings
UVic was also ranked in the top 25 in the world for:
- 19th for SDG 1: No poverty
- 22nd for SDG 6: Clean water and sanitation
- 25th for SDG 8: Decent work and economic growth
- 12th for SDG 12: Responsible consumption and production
CIFAL Victoria
CIFAL Victoria is one of 24 UN training centres for government authorities across Asia, Oceania, Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, all coordinated by UNITAR’s social development programme. The central purpose of CIFAL training programs is to develop and strengthen human capacities to better respond to development challenges and to facilitate City-to-City (C2C) partnerships.
UNITAR is the UN training arm with a strategy focused on achieving the SDGs and supporting governments to implement the 2030 agenda.
“The CIFAL Global Network meets a crucial need to strengthen capacities to better address development challenges and exchange good practices amongst local authorities, academia, the private sector and the United Nations,” says Estrella Merlos, associate director of UNITAR’s CIFAL Global Network.