Performance Overview
UC Berkeley takes a comprehensive approach to sustainability goals and strategies, guided by its Campus Sustainability Plan. The plan, which is structured into five focus sections and 15 topics, includes traditional environmental indicators like energy efficiency, green buildings, and transportation while providing a framework for intersectional and emerging topics, like diversity,inclusion,health, and wellness in sustainability. The plan also provides vision statements for each section, which serve as guiding lights to focus prioritization of goals and strategies.
For over a decade, the Office of Sustainability has been conducting inventories across sustainability performance categories and transparently and publicly reporting this information through the Sustainability, Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS), a comprehensive sustainability rating system for colleges and universities that addresses the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability. In our 2025 submission, UC Berkeley earned a Platinum rating, which is the highest category. This marks an exciting achievement and a substantial improvement from our first-ever STARS submission in 2018: not only has UC Berkeley advanced from Gold to Platinum, but it succeeded despite stricter criteria under the newest edition of STARS (version 3.0)--the first university in the world to do so. In each of the performance category pages you will find both our campus performance standing as well as our STARS assessment.
Campus Performance Overview
Each year, UC Berkeley tallies our progress toward our sustainability goals and reflects on what is working while identifying opportunities to pursue next. As we reach our goals, we stretch further, taking on new environmental challenges. On the performance category pages below you will find both our current UCOP as well asUC Berkeley goals and a current assessment of how we are moving forward.
See our latest performance reporting in the UC Annual Sustainability Report
STARS Performance Overview
In its 2025 submission, UC Berkeley earned aPlatinum rating in the Sustainability, Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS), a leading framework from AASHE for measuring sustainability performance in higher education, encompassing environmental, social, and economic dimensions.
This marks UC Berkeley’s second consecutive Platinum rating, building on our 2021 achievement and highlighting continued progress despite more rigorous standards introduced in STARS version 3.0. The updated STARS framework allowed us to better capture the full scope of our sustainability efforts across academics, operations, research, and community engagement.
With a score of 86.76 points, UC Berkeley became the first institution to achieve a Platinum rating under STARS 3.0, out of 1,263 participating colleges and universities. UC Berkeley’s score also represents a 1.4-point improvement over the2021 submission under STARS 2.2.
As a campus with a deep legacy of environmental leadership and innovation, UC Berkeley is proud to be recognized by the most comprehensive and widely adopted sustainability assessment tool in higher education.
See the full STARS report.
Per STARS: "The Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System™ (STARS®) is a transparent, self-reporting framework for colleges and universities to measure their sustainability performance. STARS is designed to enable meaningful comparisons over time and across institutions using a common set of measurements developed with broad participation from the international campus sustainability community..."
Campus Initiatives
Climate
Built Environment
Energy
Food
Land Use
Procurement
Transportation 
Waste 
Water
Academics & Learning
Research
Engagement
Metrics