UC Davis has retained its spot as the most sustainable university in North America and seventh in the world, according to the 2026 UI GreenMetric World University rankings announced Thursday (Sept. 24) by the University of Indonesia.
The rankings have named UC Davis “greenest” in North America for 11 years in a row and among the world’s top 10 for 14 consecutive years.
“We're thrilled to represent the nation in this area,” Chancellor Gary S. May said in a video prepared for the awards ceremony in Azerbaijan. “From campus operations to public engagement, we are taking tangible steps toward a more sustainable world.”
Some of those steps include projects like the Big Shift, which will switch the Davis campus’ central heating source from steam to hot water, which can be powered by renewable energy. The UC Regents this year approved the final funding component of Phase 2 of that multi-year project, including money to build a 2.25-million-gallon hot-water thermal energy storage tank, which will allow the university to store heat when electricity is cheaper or cleaner.
When complete, the second phase of the Big Shift project will reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions in campus operations by roughly 40% and generate approximately $3.15 million in annual utility savings. When the full project is built out, those numbers can reach 80% and $8 million, respectively.
Sustainability will soon play an even larger role in the classroom at UC Davis with a new general education requirement in climate change literacy, effective in 2030. The Davis Division of the Academic Senate approved that change earlier this year, with the goal of giving undergraduates across all majors grounding in climate science, justice and solutions. Faculty are currently developing courses through a Climate Change Course Development Faculty Learning Community.
More than 2,000 universities participated in this year’s UI GreenMetric rankings, and a new metric — governance and digitalization — was considered in 2026. The factors considered, along with their weighting, are:
- Setting and infrastructure (11%)
- Energy and climate change (20%)
- Waste (17%)
- Water (11%)
- Transportation (17%)
- Education and research (13%)
- Governance and digitalization (11%)
UC Davis and rankings
A world-class university, UC Davis is highly ranked for how it transforms students’ lives, the impact of its research, the excellence of its academic programs, sustainability and more. The university performs self-evaluations and also appreciates the value of third-party assessments. However, ranking methods vary, change over time and can be subjective. UC Davis focuses on those rankings that most closely align with its mission and values — including serving the public good, inclusiveness and equity, and social mobility — and in national rankings looks most closely at its standing among public universities. UC Davis encourages prospective students and their families to weigh rankings among other factors in their college decision, talk with counselors and UC Davis admissions advisors, and, if possible, visit the campus.