Formal sustainability efforts at IU Indianapolis first began in 2005 thanks to an interdisciplinary group of faculty and staff interested in advancing sustainability on campus – the Campus Sustainability Initiative. This core group of advocates united ongoing campus efforts into a central movement to foster greater awareness and application of sustainability practices into all areas of the campus. After six years of efforts directed by the Campus Sustainability Initiative, the IU Indianapolis Office of Sustainability was founded in 2011 with the mission of creating a culture of sustainability at IU Indianapolis and in the Indianapolis community.
Since 2011, the campus has seen great progress. In 2013, IU Indianapolis’s first Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System (STARS) report was submitted, earning a Silver rating with 52.09 points. STARS, created by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, is a transparent, self-reporting framework for colleges and universities to measure their sustainability performance. Since IU Indianapolis's first STARS report, the university has seen consistent improvement, resulting in its current Gold rating, making IU Indianapolis the highest-rated university in Indiana. This increase in IU Indianapolis’s rating is indicative of the amount of change that has occurred on campus since the office’s foundation.
IU Indianapolis also participates in THE (Times Higher Education) Impact Rankings, the only global performance tables that assess universities against the SDGs by using carefully calibrated indicators to provide comprehensive and balanced comparisons across research, outreach, and stewardship. IU Indianapolis submitted its first THE Impact Rankings for the 2021 reporting cycle, earning an overall #2 US ranking and #28 global ranking. In 2022, IU Indianapolis was named #8 in the US and within the Top 10% internationally for delivering on the SDGs against the largest cohort of participating universities in Impact Rankings history. IU Indianapolis is proud to be ranked highest in SDGs #3, #5, #10, #16 and #17, ranking 3rd, 4th, 3rd, 4th, and 4th nationally respectively and within the Top 10% internationally across the board. The full global ranking results can be viewed here.