This study develops a synthetic sustainability indicator (SSI) to assess corporate sustainability performance using data from Spanish IBEX 35 companies. Utilizing sparse principal components analysis (sPCA), the study condenses 65 Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) variables into a single indicator, addressing the lack of standardization in CSR evaluations and enabling comparisons across companies and sectors. The results show that environmental practices are the most significant factor (37.30%), followed by labor practices (19.23%) and corporate governance (18.52%). The study’s key contribution lies in offering a quantifiable, transparent method for evaluating corporate sustainability. The SSI provides valuable insights for investors and analysts, promoting data-driven decision-making and encouraging corporate improvements in sustainability performance.

Environmental culture in university students refers to the set of knowledge, values and behaviors that they acquire and practice with the protection of the environment within their academic space, supported by environmental educational policies. We proposed to understand the existence of an inadequate environmental culture in university students. The objective of this study was to analyze university educational policies and environmental culture in Peruvian students, comparing the results according to sociodemographic variables. A total of 2448 intentionally chosen university students participated, a non-experimental cross-sectional design was used, a quantitative approach of comparative descriptive level was used. In addition, in the data analysis, the descriptive results are presented in a table of frequencies and percentages, while the inferential analyses are presented in statistics. A medium level of environmental culture was found at 57.3% with a tendency to be low at 37.3% in university students. In addition, the comparison of sociodemographic variables indicates that there are statistically significant differences (p < 0.05), therefore, the students from public universities, the area of social sciences and the last years of study present higher scores than the other comparison groups. In conclusion, environmental educational policies have not been adequate and applied by universities to generate an adequate environmental culture in university students within the academic field.