Education for Sustainable Development

Eduaction is one of the main leverage points we have. The newly created Worldforum of Universities of Resources on Sustainability (WFURS) is dedicated to furthering education and research in the field of raw materials. It is a necessary response to inaction lack of attention the topic of raw materials as Prof. Bernd Meyer, 1st president of WFURS and TU Bergakademie Freiberg pointed out.

With a broader approach but similar intention, the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative for Rio+20 addresses university worldwide and declares:

· Teach sustainable development concepts 

· Encourage research on sustainable development issues 

· Green our campuses 

· Support sustainability efforts 

· Engage with and share results through international frameworks 

This action and urge is clearly needed since little has been done by the majority of programs as Thomas Korbun, Scientific Director, Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW) says:

"Only 2 % of the German university teaching programmes include even any sustainability content, not even just resource efficiency issues. We should be very aware of this tremendous challenge because in conferences like this we might tend to think that everybody knows about sustainable resource use - but this is unfortunately not the case." 

Links and Resources: 

IÖW website: http://www.ioew.de/en/

Higher Education Sustainability Initiative for Rio+20: http://www.uncsd2012.org/index.php?page=view&nr=341&type=12&menu=35

Worldforum of Universities of Resources on Sustainability (WFURS): http://www.worldforum-sustainability.org/