Future challenges for sustainable development

Even though the origins of the terms ‘sustainable development’ or ‘sustainability’ go back many decades and both have been used on an ad hoc basis, public perception about – and the international visibility of – sustainable development was substantially enhanced with the 1987 publication of Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report.

This publication reported on the deliberations of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), a body set up by the United Nations back under the chairmanship of Gro H Brundtland – who at the time was Norway’s prime minister – with the mandate to investigate the links between environmental protection (a term which was already well established) and development, and to suggest ways to combine both.

Subsequent to the publication of Our Common Future, the United Nations assembly voted to run the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), under the chairmanship of Maurice Strong, a Canadian industrialist.

The event was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 1992. This is exactly 20 years ago and the World Conference on Sustainable Development, also called Rio+20, is about to begin.

There is no doubt that, over the past two decades, sustainability has found its way into the UN system, government agencies, enterprises and institutions of higher education across the world.

More importantly, the modern views of sustainable development pledged by Our Common Future are not limited to ecological considerations. Instead, they have been and are now paying due attention to economic, social and political variables, which influence the process.

Rio+20

The Rio+20 phase is characterised by a new dynamic in the general perception of what sustainability is, with a wide assumption that not only governments, but also individuals, institutions and even businesses – which had largely been outside the debate – need to commit to sustainability.

The fact that the United Nations declared the period 2005 -14 as the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development has provided further impetus, albeit not to the extent originally expected.

The forthcoming Rio+20 conference will be likely to provide additional momentum and hopefully start a new phase, with a greater perception of what sustainability is, what it means to higher education institutions and what it can achieve.

Sustainability and higher education

In terms of the higher education sector, the evolution of the debate on sustainable development over the past 15 years, and the discussion of sustainability today at universities and colleges in particular, have been fairly well documented.

This documentation has also covered areas such as sustainability in the curriculum, in planning or in the broad field of policy. Over the past five years, much progress has also been made and there have been visible achievements in respect of sustainability, and sustainability science.

Progress has also been seen in terms of greening the curriculum, in respect of environmental performance, and at the institutional level.

Within the tertiary sector, there have been various landmarks in respect of the design of approaches and mechanisms to integrate sustainability more into higher education. This process has included the preparation of many important documents such as the:

• • Magna Charta of European Universities (1988).
  
• • Talloires Declaration of University Presidents for a Sustainable Future (1990).
  
• • Halifax document Creating a Common Future: An action plan for universities (1991), Lester Pearson Institute for International Development 1992.
  
• • “Urgent Appeal from the CRE” to the Preparatory Committee of UNCED (1991).
  
• • COPERNICUS Universities Charter for Sustainable Development (1994).
  
• • Lüneburg Declaration on Higher Education for Sustainable Development (2001).
  
• • Ubuntu Declaration on Education and Science and Technology for Sustainable Development (2002).
  
• • Graz Declaration on Committing Universities to Sustainable Development (2005).
  
• • G8 University Summit Sapporo Sustainability Declaration (2008).
  
• • G8 University Summit: Statement of Action (2010).

Except for the Ubuntu Declaration, which has been pursued by a number of organisations since Johannesburg, the majority of the other declarations, agreements and action plans have one thing in common: they have never been fully implemented.

Implementation problem

This is not a criticism of the process leading to their preparation, but of the failure to ensure their implementation. The experience from these agreements shows that it makes little sense to have a group of people agreeing on sets of procedures and actions without having the means to ensure their implementation.

Perhaps part of the problem lies in the fact that even though there are convincing examples that show the usefulness of a sustainability focus in higher education institutions, they have not been documented and disseminated as they should have been.

As a result, there is now a certain degree of scepticism in preparing new declarations on action plans since the experiences of the past are not that positive.

Moreover, despite the various actions taken at the international level, much has still to be done at the regional and local levels.

Indeed, 24 years after Our Common Future was published, nearly 20 years after Agenda 21 was produced and 10 years after the world’s commitment to sustainability was reiterated in the Johannesburg Declaration, the need for disseminating approaches, methods, projects and initiatives aimed at fostering the cause of sustainable development is as pressing as ever.

The experiences of the past show that new and innovative ways are needed to foster the cause of sustainable development at higher education institutions in a more concrete and, hence, a more meaningful way.

This is not to say that the future debate on sustainability needs to be ‘atheoretical’. A sound theoretical basis for sustainability is and will still be valuable and is a precondition for the successful implementation of sustainability programmes.

Having said that, there is a perceived need for a new, fresh look at the ways we handle sustainable development at universities, since the time for just discussing definitions or conceptual elements has long passed.

As this short commentary has tried to demonstrate, much has been achieved and can still be done in respect of fostering sustainability in higher education.

Higher education's contribution is significant in the sense that it can not only foster sustainability learning in specific contexts, but also guide future decisions where social, economic and ecological aspects may go hand in hand.

* Walter Leal Filho is a senior professor at London Metropolitan University in the UK, and at Uppsala University in Sweden, as well as at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany, where he heads the Applications of Life Sciences Centre. He is editor of the award-winning book series Environmental Education, Communication and Sustainability, with more than 30 volumes produced to date, and is founding editor of the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education. Leal Filho is one of the world’s leading sustainability researchers. He has written, edited or co-edited more than 60 books, has nearly 200 published papers and book chapters to his credit, and was chair and convenor of the scientific committee of the World Symposium on Sustainable Development at Universities, which ran in parallel with the UN Conference on Sustainable Development.