Education for Sustainable Development

Papers in Honour of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014)

Brian Chalkley, Martin Haigh, David Higgitt, Brian Chalkley, Martin Haigh, David Higgitt

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317991106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In 2005, The United Nations launched its Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, which recognises that education, including Higher Education is the key to the change in social attitudes that will be needed to protect the welfare of future generations. This involves helping learners to live as though the future matters and to achieve ecoliteracy. This includes the understanding that personal lifestyle decisions may have consequences, ranging from climate change, through loss of biodiversity, to pollution and resource depletion that may permit environmental degradation on a planetary scale. It also involves helping them to develop the skills needed to cope with such challenges. This international collection of research papers and position statements from special issues of the Journal of Geography in Higher Education and Applied Environmental Education and Communication, written by many of the leading practitioners in the field, aims to provide resources and practical guidance for all seeking to promote and engage in education for a sustainable future. Rabindranath Tagore encouraged each learner to make their actions demonstrate a harmonious union between education and environment. David Orr argued that the world needs people who live well in their places to make the world both habitable and humane and that the main challenge for education is to help learners make their minds fit for life on Earth. This book tries to chart a practical route towards these objectives.

This book was previously published as special issues of the Journal of Geography in Higher Education and Applied Environmental Education and Communication

Educating Earth-literate Leaders

STEPHEN MARTIN & ROLF JUCKER

Introduction

We are now citizens of the Earth joined in a common enterprise with many variations. We have every right to insist that those who purport to lead us be worthy of the task. Imagine such a time! (Orr, 2003)

Universities and colleges the world over are facing some serious challenges as demand grows for a better qualified and more flexible workforce in an increasingly complex and dynamically changing world. Globalization and further expansion of the European Union require new types of knowledge and new forms of professional expertise. And nowhere is this need for new competences and capacity building more crucial than in the area of sustainable development where problems transcend national boundaries and call for new forms of cooperation and ways of learning (Sterling, 2001; Jucker, 2002).

Whilst there are a small number of examples of emerging good practice in meeting this challenge, the sustainability agenda has not had a major impact on the thinking and practice of the majority of staff who teach in universities. And yet the very survival of our species is threatened by the world consuming goods and services at an unsustainable pace, with serious consequences for the well-being of people and the planet (Worldwatch Institute, 2003).

This paper explores some of the key challenges facing universities as they embrace the sustainability agenda.

The Changing Professional Landscape in the EU

For nearly three decades education policy has been driven principally by the perceived need to equip people with the skills and knowledge required to produce goods and services capable of competing in an increasingly aggressive global market. In the UK, the existing policy framework for sustainable development is currently under review, and will be influenced by a number of individual policy papers on, inter alia, energy, sustainable communities, proposals for substantial reforms of agriculture (the Curry Report) and planning regulations. More recently, a sustainable development action plan for education and skills, published by the Department for Education and Skills (http://www.dfes.gov.uk/sd/) will also have to be taken into account. The sustainability agenda has already had a major impact on the labour or occupational market for those who have taken part in educational courses and training programmes in the environmental field. The scale and range of the so-called eco-industries in the European Union (EU) is summarized in Table 1.

In a global context, the market for eco-industries is estimated at around €550 billion which means that the EU has approximately one-third of the overall market, equal to the USA (ECOTEC, 2000). Whilst this ECOTEC report focused mainly on pollution and resource management, other sources indicate that job opportunities for those with an environmental education have tended to spread from the public to the private sector as well as into the rapidly growing non-governmental sector of public interest organizations, not-for-profit consulting firms and various publication, media and information outlets. New posts are emerging within the agencies of the EU itself as well as inter-governmental bodies. There is clearly an increasing range of new and demanding career trajectories that universities will need to reflect in reviewing and updating their undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.

The qualifications that are now required for the growing and diverse range of jobs in this emerging labour market are significantly different from those that previously characterized the environmental professions in Europe. Most of those employed in an environmental capacity within local authorities at a national level, including research and teaching staff, were primarily from a natural science discipline, whereas the new positions call for new kinds of competences in business, economics, law, politics, sociology, communications and computer science as well as in environmental ethics, human ecology and environmental management. Some sources predict that in the future courses will need to include conflict management and an understanding of cultural differences in international contexts (Essence, 2001).

Table 1. The market for goods & services in the eco-industries in the EU (includes the EU 15 and candidate countries for enlargement (ECOTEC Research and Consultancy, 2000))

Total Goods and Services	€183 billion/year
Direct employment	2 million FTEs
Investment	€54 billion/year
Renewables market	€5 billion/year

In addition, there is strong evidence of a greater emphasis being placed on interdisciplinary, problem-solving capability rather than a traditional and overly specialized scientific competence. Geography, with its long tradition of multidisciplinary approaches, should be well placed to lead this shift towards problem-centred, rather than discipline-centred education. In particular, geography, earth and environmental sciences will be challenged to significantly contribute to the growing emphasis in the UK and Europe on developing sustainable communities (see for example the Egan Review, 2004). In the UK and Holland these issues are being addressed by the creation of a number of new interdisciplinary professional groups, such as the Sustainability Alliance, the Society for the Environment in the UK, the Dutch Association for Environmental Professionals and the Professional Practice for Sustainable Development (PP4SD) initiative (see Martin & Hall, 2002; Martin 2002; and http://www.sustainabilityalliance.org.uk; http://www.vvm. to; http://www.ies-uk.org.uk).

Educating Earth-literate Leaders

As we look back on the World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg and reflect on its impact, it seems apparent that political leadership the world over has so far failed to rise to the challenge of sustainability (UNED-UK, 2002). And yet in all likelihood most of the hundred or so leaders who attended will have a higher education degree from some of the world’s most prestigious universities.

This raises some serious questions for our university administrators and the governance structures. Why, as David Orr once remarked, is it that the people who contribute most to exploiting poor communities and the Earth’s ecosystems are those with BAs, MScs and PhDs and not the ‘ignorant’ poor from the South (Orr, 1994)? Why is the illiteracy amongst the world’s politicians as to how the world works as a living system so widespread? Why is it so rare that we encounter in our leaders the qualities needed to enable sustainability: humility, respect for all forms of life and future generations, precaution and wisdom, the capacity to think systemically and challenge unethical actions? And more worryingly on the basis of current performance, what hope of improvement is there for future leaders?

The fact that the higher education sector is seriously failing society by producing leaders incapable of addressing our most pressing problems should trigger some critical consideration about the fundamental role of universities in society, based on three key assumptions:

• If universities are the nursery of tomorrow’s leaders and educate most of the people who develop and manage society’s institutions, then the sector bears “profound responsibilities to increase the awareness, knowledge, technologies, and tools to create a sustainable future”, as the Talloires Declaration (signed by many of the world’s university leaders) stated in 1990 (ULSF, 1990). This clearly implies that graduates of every discipline (whether as engineers, teachers, politicians, lawyers, architects, biologists, banks managers or tourism operators, etc.) will need a sound working knowledge of sustainability.

• Universities the world over are regarded as centres of the most advanced knowledge. They should therefore, through their teaching and their institutional practice, embody role models for the wider society and be microcosms of best practice for the future.

• “Higher education institutions are allowed academic freedom and a tax-free status to receive public and private resources”, says Anthony Cortese from Second Nature, a leading US institution in education for sustainability (Cortese, 1999). In exchange for this privileged position, society rightly expects from universities that they contribute as much as possible to the solution of society’s problems.

To these reflections should be added the fact that sustainable development is now a mainstream policy issue in the UK and the EU and that there is an increasing demand for graduates with a broad interdisciplinary training in sustainable development and problem solving (Essence, 2001). All of this suggests that we should develop strategies on how to turn the universities into sustainable institutions.

Such strategies would need to be concerned with all aspects of higher education and find answers to the following questions: How is the ecological footprint (impact) of these institutions shaping up to sustainability criteria? Is the sector promoting education for sustainable development across the curriculum? Do universities fulfil their role in communities and promote sustainable development through outreach and collaboration with industry? What value has the research done in universities when considered in a sustainability framework (i.e. does it contribute to solving the most urgent problems or does it boost unsustainable practices)? And lastly, what do the graduates of these institutions do in the world? Are they contributing to the building of a sustainable society or are they, as one leading commentator says, ‘part of the rear guard of a vandal economy’ (Orr, 1994)?

An analysis of the university system based on these questions shows relatively little progress. University systems have not been at the forefront of implementing sustainability and have even lagged behind developments within school systems (UNESCO, 1997). The main reason cited for the inability of our universities to engage in this transdisciplinary endeavour called sustainability is that “the frontiers between academic disciplines remain stoutly defended by professional bodies, career structures and criteria for promotion and advancement” (UNESCO, 1997). The university system ignores this issue at its peril because, as the International Association of Universities has stated, “Universities must not forfeit their natural claim to leadership. If we do not get involved … to help solve the overwhelming problems of our global society … we shall be ignored” (IAU, 1993).

Sustainable Universities?

There is a growing and in some senses an overwhelming range of tools and techniques available to any institution or organization setting out on the sustainable development journey (see for example, http://www.projectsigma.com; www.naturalstep.org.uk; www.unesco.org/education/tlsf). Whatever the approach, the action taken should be based on a number of important guiding principles (Bartel et al., 2001; Jucker, 2003). One of the most useful approaches is based on the five capitals model (SIGMA, 2003) because sustainable organizations need to actively manage five types of assets that they rely on and contribute to. They are:

• Natural capital (the environment);

• human capital (people);

• social capital (social relationships and structures);

• manufactured capital (fixed assets);

• financial capital (profit, loss, revenue, etc.).

It is important to stress that these assets also need to be managed for the long term not just for the immediate future, thereby building up stocks of capital and living off the interest. They are also interdependent because changes in one will probably cause an impact on another. However, in this model, one form of capital cannot simply be traded against another.

Universities, like any other organization, play a significant role in how these various forms of capital are used, developed and maintained. The most obvious one is exploiting the flows of energy and resources from the earth’s biophysical systems (e.g. land, air, water and natural systems). They also contribute to the other major form of capital that flows from the hands and brains (i.e. human capital) of the academics who work in them and the students they teach. These are the only two real sources of wealth in the world; everything else—money, machines and institutions—is derived from these primary sources. Sust...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Approaching the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development: Prospects and Challenges
• 1.1 Educating Earth-literate leaders
• 1.2 Greening the University Curriculum: Appraising an International Movement
• 1.3 Environmental Education for Sustainable Development in Russia
• 1.4 An Environmental Education Concept for Galtür, Austria
• 1.5 Sustainability, Systems Thinking and Professional Practice
• 1.6 Environmental Research and Education in US Geography
• 1.7 Finding Space for Education for Sustainable Development in the Enterprise Economy
• 1.8 Cultural Assumptions against Sustainability: An International Survey
• 1.9 A Due Diligence Report on New Zealand’s Educational Contribution to the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development
• 1.10 Sustainable Development within UK Higher Education: Revealing Tendencies and Tensions
• 1.11 A Centre of Excellence in Education for Sustainable Development
• 1.12 Sustainability Education in Scotland: The Impact of National and International Initiatives on Teacher Education and Outdoor Education
• 1.13 Promoting Environmental Education for Sustainable Development: The Value of Links between Higher Education and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)
• 1.14 The Firm and Shaky Ground of Education for Sustainable Development
• 2.1 The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014): Learning to Live Together Sustainably
• 2.2 EE and ESD: Two Paradigms, One Crucial Goal
• 2.3 Some Systems Thinking Concepts for Environmental Educators during the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development
• 2.4 Challenging a “Closing Circle”: Alternative Research Agendas for the ESD Decade
• 2.5 Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship–The UK Perspective
• 2.6 Curriculum for the Bioregion: Learning to Live Sustainably in Our “Life Places”
• 2.7 The Ahmedabad Declaration
• 2.8 Argentina and Education for Sustainable Development
• 2.9 The Decade of Education for Sustainable Development: A Perspective from Australia
• 2.10 Is It Possible to Benefit from the Decade for Education for Sustainable Development?
• 2.11 The Meaning of the DESD for Us in Japan: Three Years After Proposing it to the World
• 2.12 The Eastern Africa Environmental Network and the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development
• 2.13 Sustainable Development by Instinct, Challenges, and Opportunities in the Decade
• 2.14 The Decade of Education for Sustainable Development: Challenges and Opportunities in México
• 2.15 Education for Sustainable Development in New Zealand
• 2.16 Embarking on the Decade for Sustainable Development: A Swaziland View
• Emerging Opportunities in Education for Sustainable Development
• Index