Universities and other higher education institutions have a critical role to play in helping society achieve sustainable development. Sustainable development has been defined as ‘a development that satisfies today’s needs without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to satisfy their needs.’
In 2015, 214 million students were enrolled in university education worldwide. Accordingly, the UN has called for all institutes to ensure that learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development.
To that end, Professor Pam Fredman, Professor Bo Rothstein and Lennart Levi have proposed a possible solution.
Through the formation of the IAU, which now has 640 universities as members, has engaged itself with Agenda 2030, the UN’s sustainable development project, in collaboration with the Association of Commonwealth Universities and the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie.
These three global university networks have called on the higher education sector to adopt policies which maximise their contribution to the Agenda 2030 across teaching, research and community engagement, and to incorporate education about and for sustainable development into undergraduate curricula.
The IAU has also designated 16 universities to take on one of the first 16 sustainable development goals and each in collaboration with a dozen or so allies for its specific purpose, but with an awareness of the interaction within the system.
With the low costs of implementation and the considerable societal gains if Agenda 2030 is implemented broadly, the initiative proposed and implemented by Fredman, Rothstein and Levi has the potential to be highly cost efficient in the long term.
International Higher Education 