SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals

4International research, data and best practice

UPES works with partners abroad to gather data, compare approaches and develop better practice on the SDGs.

Comparing approaches and setting standards

• Microplastics in Germany. With Technische Hochschule Bingen, UPES researchers compiled microplastic data from German rivers, groundwater, seas and treatment plants, compared policies from the EU, France, South Korea, the Philippines and India, and proposed reporting by both mass and particle count with harmonised sampling protocols (Environmental Engineering Research, 2025).
• Microplastics in Himalayan lakes. A systematic review of 127 studies compared the Himalaya with the Alps and Andes, reviewed policies from the UN plastics treaty talks to China and the US, and proposed monitoring and remediation frameworks for cold, high-altitude lakes (Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology, 2025).
• Sharing practice at HSFEA-2025. In April 2025 UPES hosted its 5th International Sustainability Conference, where international researchers, policymakers and industry shared case studies, success stories and lessons in health, safety, environment and sustainability.
• Visiting faculty. Norwegian neuropsychologist Dr Knut Hestad taught a six-session series at UPES on depression, HIV-related cognitive deficits and ageing.
• One Health and bioinformatics. Collaborations with Leipzig University, Germany, on human, animal and environmental health, and with the University of Auckland, New Zealand, on bioinformatics.
• Research across borders. 43% of UPES's SDG research papers have international co-authors, from 121 countries and territories (see Section 1). A review of hydrogen technologies for net-zero strategies, for example, was written with partners in the UAE, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, Viet Nam, Poland, Spain and Turkey.
• Impact measurement. UPES became the first Indian university to earn Aspire Impact's Gold Leaf certification, after a standards-based assessment with full Scope 1, 2 and 3 greenhouse gas accounting, and published its Impact Assessment Report 2024–25 and GHG Emissions Report; and the RISE Centre's executive programme teaches ESG through more than 50 Indian and global case studies.

Global data infrastructure

• Global Burden of Disease. A UPES School of Health Sciences researcher is a co-author of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2023 (The Lancet, 2025), which measures 375 diseases and injuries, 88 risk factors and healthy life expectancy in 204 countries and territories. Its estimates are used to track the health-related SDG targets.
• CERN. UPES has an MoU with CERN and is a participating institute in the Future Circular Collider study, contributing to software and detectors.
• Belle II. UPES runs a Belle II GRID Computing Centre, part of the international network that stores and processes data from the Belle II experiment at KEK, Japan.
• Reporting on the SDGs. UPES submits institutional data to the THE Impact Rankings (601–800 band in 2025, across all 17 SDGs) and the QS World University Rankings: Sustainability (1501+ in 2025).
• Clean energy in practice. UPES has contributed research and capacity building to UNDP clean-energy initiatives, and distributed solar lamps to households with ASHRAE.