Cambiamento climatico: attività di ricerca e strategie delle università

In recent years, European universities have increasingly incorporated socially relevant objectives in their strategic documents. This trend is particularly characterized by the growing emphasis on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are integrated to strengthen universities’ commitment to social responsibility, impacting both research priorities and institutional management. This paper aims to explore whether and how Italian universities’ strategic documents address the research commitment to one specific goal – climate change –, since it is one of the most urgent sustainability challenges of our time that calls for proactive engagement from scientific institutions in supporting both mitigation and adaptation efforts. The study analyzes the strategic plans of fourteen Italian universities that have undertaken substantial research initiatives on climate change between 2009 and 2020. These initiatives include national and European funded projects, and the production of doctoral theses focused on climate-related issues. While the study does not aim to establish a direct causal relationship between institutional strategies and research commitment, it reveals a disconnection between the universities’ actual efforts in terms of research on climate change and the eventual inclusion of this issue in their strategic documents. This finding can be interpreted as a signal of the lack of alignment between the research agendas of the academic community and the universities’ strategies, and thus a weak effectiveness of the strategies themselves.