From sustainability to regeneration

For more than two decades, sustainability has shaped higher education’s agenda. Universities have embedded it into curricula, research priorities and institutional strategies, often aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The Times Higher Education Impact Rankings, which now track 2,526 universities across 130 countries against the SDGs, in the 2022 edition states that 87 percent of institutions submitting data on SDG 17 reported sustainability-focused courses. The commitment, on paper, is unprecedented; and it has built something real: a generation of graduates, researchers and institutions fluent in the language of planetary limits and social responsibility. That foundation now needs to carry more weight. The 2025 Planetary Health Check classified seven of the nine boundaries — including the newly transgressed ocean acidification, with ocean acidity 30–40 percent above pre-industrial levels — as breached. That widening gap between institutional commitment and measurable outcomes has pushed a different vocabulary into the conversation: the regenerative economy. Where sustainability focuses on doing less harm, regenerative approaches set a more demanding bar — actively restoring ecological and social systems (Fullerton, 2015; Raworth, 2017). Universities are not being asked to abandon what they have built; they are being invited to grow through it.