A
Framing, not mentions
Every genuine mention is coded on the four-level ladder. A count cannot tell a footprint pledge from a carbon budget.
Research project Curtin University
Universities produce the science of limits. Do they live within them?
Planetary Universities measures whether universities treat environmental limits as boundaries to work within, or as goals to trade away.
A methods project across Australian public universities, 2016 to 2025.
01 The problem
A ranking that adds up the wrong things.
Australian universities report against the Sustainable Development Goals, and are ranked on them. The Times Higher Education Impact Rankings add the goals together as if one can offset another. For the four environmental goals, clean water, climate, life below water and life on land, that logic fails. They mark ecological limits. Breaching one cannot be made up by scoring well elsewhere.
A ranking built this way contradicts the science universities themselves produce.
That contradiction matters most for universities. Their authority rests on the science they produce. It is hard to sustain when the institutions that identify ecological limits do not recognise those limits in their own conduct.
02 Goal or limit
A goal can be traded. A limit cannot.
Existing keyword methods find where a goal is mentioned. They cannot tell a footprint pledge from a carbon budget. The Instrument codes every genuine mention on a four-level ladder.
-
0
Silent
Named, but not framed.
Our commitment to addressing climate change.
-
1
Aspirational
A direction with no measure.
Another step towards reducing our carbon footprint.
-
2
Quantified
A target with a number and a date.
Net zero scope 1 and scope 2 emissions by 2030.
-
3
Limit
A commitment the university must stay within.
We will operate within our fair share of the remaining carbon budget.
A keyword count treats all four as one mention. The Instrument tells them apart.
03 The instrument
The tool finds. The researcher judges.
The Planetary Universities Instrument is a coding method with a text-analysis tool built in Document Lens. Automation locates passages, allocates them to an SDG and removes duplicates. Coders then judge relevance, framing, prominence and provenance. Two researchers code the same reports blind, and we report inter-rater agreement.
B
Consistency, not wording
The Instrument also searches for activity that works against environmental limits. It tests whether conduct matches the university's own commitments, and whether it stays within the limits the sector's science establishes.
C
Scale without over-automating
The design keeps judgement where it belongs and still covers a sector across a decade. Fully automated coding would hollow out the findings. Fully manual coding would not reach the corpus.
- Corpus
- 37 Australian public universities. Annual reports and strategies, 2016 to 2025.
- Pilot
- Eight universities, four environmental goals. Coding under way.
- Reliability
- Dual independent coding, with inter-rater agreement reported.
04 Early evidence
What the pilot is showing.
The language of limits is missing. In the first pilot, almost every genuine mention was silent, and none was framed as a limit.
9 in 10
passages are silent at both universities
1 in 20
at most are quantified
0
statements framed as a limit
0
references to planetary boundaries, safe operating space or the carbon budget across three 2025 annual reports. About 224,000 words. Keyword search reported separately from the coding.
Universities A and B, SDGs 6 and 13, single coder, not yet reconciled. Treat this as a signal, not a result.
05 What comes next
From a pilot to a sector, then beyond it.
The grant funds two HDR research assistants to extend the validated coding to all seventeen goals and across the sector for 2025. A methods paper is under review. A findings paper follows, with both assistants named as authors.
-
01
Pilot
Eight Australian universities, four environmental goals. Environmental-goal coding completed and dual-coded.
-
02
Extend
All seventeen goals across the eight universities, then the full sector for 2025.
-
03
Scale
37 Australian public universities across a decade, built for longitudinal analysis.
-
04
International
Are there planetary universities anywhere? We welcome partners who want to find out.
Outputs: a validated Instrument, an open coding method, a sector dataset and two peer-reviewed papers.
06 The team
A collaboration built for two kinds of judgement.
The method needs computational skill to read a decade of reports, and policy judgement to decide what each passage commits to. The team holds both.
-
Mike Burbridge
Project lead, Faculty of Business and Law
Developed the project's conceptual frame and co-developed the Planetary Universities Instrument. His work on Australian universities and climate change includes a 2016 study of the sector's response and, with Kuzich, a 2025 submission to the Senate inquiry into higher-education governance.
-
Sonja Kuzich
Associate professor, School of Education
Co-developed the Instrument and is the second independent coder. Her expertise in education and sustainability strengthens the coding definitions and their application.
-
Michael Borck
Faculty of Business and Law
Built Document Lens, the tool behind the automated half. It retrieves candidate passages, locates them, allocates them to an SDG and removes duplicates.
-
Fran Ackermann
Professor, Faculty of Business and Law
Provides methodological oversight and research-design rigour, and mentors the early-career lead.
Two Faculty of Business and Law HDR research assistants extend the coding across the sector and are named as authors on the findings paper.
Contact
Work with us.
We welcome international partners, and access to institutional reports and curriculum documents for the empirical work.
Project lead
mike.burbridge@curtin.edu.auSupported by a 2026 Collaborative SDG Project Grant from the Faculty of Business and Law, Curtin University.