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The appraisal of educational institution campuses’ sustainability performance has been on the rise within the past decades. This appraisal is primarily due to the importance of establishing and executing planning policies targeted at designing smart, healthy, and sustainable campuses. In ensuring environmental sustainability for smart development in Nigeria tertiary institution campuses, allocating relative importance and weights to selected indicators was carried out via the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The relevant indicators peculiar to Nigeria’s higher education institutions were identified based on social media user-generated content. The AHP involves a pairwise comparison survey with 18 certified town planning professionals from different parts of the country. The study prioritized transportation as the most important sustainability attribute for planning the smart campuses of tertiary-level education institutions in Nigeria elsewhere with similar environments. The study proposed the development of a spatial data infrastructure for achieving the Africa smart city agenda.

Despite the plethora of comprehensive review of campus sustainability assessment tools, reporting, and indicators in the extant literature, studies are absent specifically on campus-wide and spatial-based indicators in existing tools. Although, several academic campuses across the globe are located on a vast area of land with multiple activities and operations associated with serious ecological consequences. This paper explores the environmental-dimension indicators with spatial and campus-wide attributes in 13 existing campus sustainability appraisal tools via coverage evaluation and the SMART approach. The findings reveal a severe absence of comprehensive coverage of spatial-based indicators and the lack of the integration of a GIS and or related spatial software in their appraisal process. The article demonstrates how integrating GIS and or other related spatial techniques and software into environmental dimension indicators with campus-wide and spatial attributes could be carried out to remedy the challenges of absence, inadequate of or restrained access to basic information for campus sustainability appraisal project in developing world.