(The Problem with) UN SDGs as a Measure of Sustainability in Academic Libraries, and an Exploration of Alternatives

Abstract

Year over year, we are continuing to observe the impacts of the climate crisis worsen, from floods, fires (lest we forget the persistent air quality advisory from wildfire smoke across Canada and the United States in summer 2023) and storms, to climate refugees and climate anxiety. As Dr. Kimberly Nicholas (2021) so succinctly frames the climate crisis: “It’s warming. It’s us. We’re sure. It’s bad. We can fix it.” In order to fix it, we all have a role to play – especially academic libraries. All jobs are climate jobs—academic library professionals need to respond to the call for action to reflect on their professional scope of influence to determine the ways in which we can have an impact and push our institutions towards meaningful change. In 2015, the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which centres 17 goals meant to simultaneously recognize and inspire action on targets related to health, education, inequality, economic growth, and climate change. These United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) categorize and rank progress within and between countries based on the 17 goals. This paper seeks to address the question of how to assess sustainability in academic libraries. While the UN SDGs are one of, if not the most, prominent forms of thinking about sustainable assessment in higher education, the inadequacy of the UN SDGs should cause pause and prompt consideration of alternative measures of sustainability in academic libraries. I aim to point in the direction of other alternative forms of sustainable assessment that may be more productively deployed in the context of academic libraries that address the gaps found in the UN SDGs, such as Indigenous methodologies, the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS), the Sustainable Libraries Initiative (SLI) or true cost assessment.