WATCH: Our Sustainable Development Goals Report

11 Oct 2021

Our new Sustainable Development Goals Report 2021-22 is available to download

This week the University has launched a comprehensive report which highlights how we are addressing key issues facing humanity as set-out by the United Nations. 

The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are our world’s call to action on the most pressing challenges and opportunities facing humanity and the natural world. We acknowledge the profound obligation on universities like Manchester to play a full role in creating and sharing knowledge to address the challenges set out in Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 

As one of the world’s leading research institutions and the UK’s only university to have social responsibility as a core goal, we’re tackling the SDGs in four inter-related ways: through our research, our learning and students, our public engagement activity and our operations. 

Impact on sustainable development involves complex methodological challenges and limitations. In April 2021, we were proud to be ranked first from over 1,200 universities across 98 different countries in the 2021 Times Higher Education Impact tables, based on our SDG performance. We’ve also been the UK’s top performing university for three consecutive years in 2019, 2020 and 2021 on this measure. 

We’ve championed sustainable development through actions in the Our Future strategic plan, through regional, national and global partnerships and our commitment to transparent reporting in publications like our 2019 SDG Report, and now our new 2021/22 SDG Report.  

This report is aimed at a wide range of local, national and international audiences across the public, private, NGO, policy and education sectors. We hope it stimulates further ideas, actions and collaboration opportunities and partnerships so that, together, we can play a full role in tackling the world’s SDGs by 2030.

Download our new Sustainable Development Goals Report 

See our Shorthand story 

Visit our website  

Watch our short film: