Leading Article: Green giants

Today People and Planet publishes its annual league table of how green our universities are, thereby putting useful pressure on higher education.

It puts three new universities at the top – Gloucestershire, Plymouth and the University of the West of England – who do brilliantly on the number of eco-staff they employ, and on other issues like fair trade status.

The institutions that do badly will be irritated by the methodology because it ignores teaching and research into sustainability. But People and Planet say, with justification, that there are no reliable measures for measuring how green the curriculum is.