UEA lands in world’s top 20 for health and wellbeing in sustainability ranking
By: Communications
The University of East Anglia (UEA) has been named among the world’s top universities for health and wellbeing for its students and wider society in a global sustainability ranking table released today (Tuesday 5 December).
The QS World University Rankings for Sustainability 2024 judged over 1,400 educational institutions worldwide, measuring their abilities to tackle the world’s environmental, social and governance challenges.
UEA ranked =14th (inside the top 1% of institutions globally) in its ‘Health and Wellbeing’ metric, which ‘assesses an institution’s commitment to improving the health and wellbeing not only of its students, but society more widely’.
Recent examples of support offered by UEA for its students’ health and wellbeing include opening up a new social space for students on campus named ‘The Warren’, installing period product dispensers across campus and setting up a Borrow Bank, where students can borrow items such as clothing for interviews, electronics and sports equipment.
UEA’s student Wellbeing Service has continued to provide an excellent suite of services to ensure that they meet the needs of the University’s student population. Since September over 1,500 students have been seen by wellbeing advisers, over 1,000 students have attended appointments with the therapies team, and over 4,000 students have attended wellbeing workshops and groups.
The team have a target time of ten working days between the student’s first contact and a first appointment, and were recently held up by TASO (Transforming Access and Student Outcomes). You can find more information on the services offered by the UEA’ s wellbeing team on YouTube.
The University’s commitment to improving the health and wellbeing of wider society has also been in evidence throughout 2023 with a number of successful research discoveries, including a revolutionary bone cancer treatment that could save the lives of thousands of children, the link between eating a Mediterranean diet and reducing the risk of dementia, and a project that revealed the most effective ways of tracking the spread of Covid.
And on the week of the COP28 summit in Dubai, UEA also placed strongly within ‘Environmental Research’ in QS’s rankings, finishing =23rd, and in the top 2% in the world. The metric measures the impact of the research environment at institutions in topics aligned to specific the UN Sustainable Development Goals based on clean energy, sustainable communities, responsible consumption, climate action, and life below water and on land.
UEA’s world-renowned environmental research covers a wide range of the impacts of climate change, including biodiversity in the Amazon rainforest, the prevalence of wildfires, and researchers travelling to the Antarctic to carry out polar ice trials.
Last year, UEA became the UK’s first university to offer a ‘Mindfulness and Active Hope’ course to help its students deal with eco-anxiety (a course which returned this autumn), and the university has stated its own ambition to become 100% net zero by 2045.
Prof David Maguire, Vice-Chancellor, said: “One of our most important functions as a university is the health and happiness of our students, so I’m delighted to have been named among the world’s top universities for health and wellbeing. Our hardworking student and staff wellbeing teams do so much to ensure that students enjoy their time here, so it’s great to see their work recognised.
“On a wider societal scale, we launched UEA’s Civic Charter as part of our yearlong celebrations of our 60th anniversary, which outlines our continued community commitment to find solutions to the many complex challenges that society faces.”
The full list of QS World University Rankings for Sustainability can be found on the QS website.
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