Three decades of sustainability at Leuphana University Lüneburg

Last year Leuphana University Lüneburg won Germany’s most prestigious award for sustainability in educational institutions. The university in northern Germany has been on a three-decade sustainability journey, embracing a ‘whole institution’ approach and infusing sustainability into all aspects of its teaching, research and operation.

Deutscher Nachhaltigkeitspreis’ German Sustainability Award is the national award for excellence in business, research and communities and is the largest award of its kind in Europe.

As the university proudly wrote: “The jury’s decision confirms that Leuphana is one of the 100 pioneers of transformation in Germany, taking the top spot among German educational institutions, and that its transdisciplinary approach carries the idea of sustainability into business and society.”



Why is sustainability so strong at Leuphana University Lüneburg?

“As often, it’s a mixture of different things,” said Daniel Fischer, professor of sustainability education and communication at Leuphana, which is an ancient name for the people and region around Lüneburg in northern Germany where the university is located.

“But among other things there was a window of opportunity to specialise as a university in a very competitive environment with scarce resources at certain times. So it was a niche to grow and thrive in. And that worked very well,” said Fischer, who is also UNESCO chair in higher education for sustainable development.

With sustainability becoming increasingly important in and outside the university sector, being ahead of the sustainability curve became a strategic advantage for Leuphana. Sustainability efforts have leadership support, which is crucial.

“Our degree programmes are a key achievement in what makes this university sustainable,” Fischer told University World News.

But Leuphana also pursues sustainability on multiple other fronts. For example, it has been doing sustainability reporting for years, which it is now widening to include areas such as endowments and investments.

The campus – carbon neutral since 2014 – is becoming increasingly sustainable. It will soon be car free, with the grounds ‘renaturalised’.

“In Germany, many universities have now adopted sustainability. You have vice-presidents, and you have green offices and degree programmes. We are in the stage now where we are wondering what should be the next step that we can take in this trajectory,” he explained.

Brief overview

Leuphana University Lüneburg was founded in 1946 with a primary focus on teacher training. It became a university of applied sciences in the 1970s and was rebranded again in 2007.

Today, the university is respected for its focus on sustainability, digital transformation, and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration in research and teaching.

There are around 9,500 students across fields that include law, economics, social sciences, natural sciences, humanities and engineering. Most are undergraduate students, with smaller proportions enrolled on masters, doctoral and teacher qualification courses.

Leuphana has held a UNESCO chair in higher education for sustainable development since 2005. The first chairholder was Professor Gerd Michelsen and the second was Professor Daniel J Lang. UNESCO Chairs are awarded for outstanding research and teaching in UNESCO fields of work.

Michelsen, an economist, was instrumental in developing the Institute for Sustainability and Environmental Communication.

In the early 1990s he recommended creating an environmental sciences programme, which opened the way for an interdisciplinary department of environmental sciences and kicked off Leuphana’s sustainability journey.

A December 2023 article by Michelsen in Earth Charter Magazine described how he pushed a resolution for sustainability to be integrated into university education and operations.

The resolution was supported and German federal funding obtained for a project titled “Agenda 21 – Leuphana University Lüneburg” that ran from 1999 to 2003.

“The project was accompanied by heated controversy. Colleagues from the economic sciences in particular, saw the university’s downfall,” Michelsen wrote.

“In their opinion, dealing with the value-based idea of sustainability did not belong at a university, as science was fundamentally value-free,” he stated.

But that is long in the past. In 2000 Leuphana became the first university to receive EMAS – Europe’s Eco Management and Audit Scheme – certification, one of many milestones along a sustainability path that now receives worldwide attention.

“A special feature of the Lüneburg sustainability process is its holistic approach, in which the so-called ‘whole institution approach’ has been practised from the very beginning,” said Michelsen. In the article he outlined 10 key lessons learned along the sustainability way. They are, verbatim:

1. From the outset, there should be clarity about the goals and the long-term nature of a sustainability process to be pursued.
2. The sustainability process must start with committed and reliable colleagues who are aware of the scope of such a process.
3. To be able to start a sustainability process at all, the university management must support it.
4. The highest political body of the university should make a fundamental decision on such a process.
5. Formal and informal participatory opportunities must be created for all members and affiliates of the university.
6. The sustainability process should follow the ‘whole institution approach’ from the outset.
7. Representatives from each of the faculties should be actively involved in the process and assigned specific tasks and responsibilities.
8. Great importance should be attached to the communication process about the sustainability process internally and externally, and successes as well as obstacles should be named.
9. Critics of the process should be met with composure and calm; emotional confrontation should be avoided at all costs.
10. The main actors in the process need steadfastness, perseverance, commitment, and tolerance of frustration.

Embedding sustainability

Thankfully, said Fischer – the third UNESCO chair at Leuphana – since returning to Germany he has noticed that colleagues have become much more open to sustainability. “They see the value, the need for it, and it’s starting to trickle down into teacher education more,” he noted.

Fischer obtained bachelor and masters degrees at the University of Osnabrück and his PhD at Leuphana, where he became an assistant professor. From 2018 he worked at Arizona State University in the United States, and then Wageningen University in the Netherlands, before recently returning to Leuphana as professor of sustainability education and communication.

His research uses inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to explore how communication and learning can facilitate more sustainable ways of living and consuming.

“One area of interest is in how we create new learning experiences for students that take them where we think we need to go collectively, to unlearn our way out of unsustainability, which is really the challenge. So, learning experiences that disrupt routines, that make us reflect on things that we took for granted,” he said.

Fischer believes learners can benefit from well considered innovations in pedagogy. “We’re all trying to advance as educators. Creating space for less transmissive and more transformative education is a key takeaway not just from my research, but the broader body of research that we see in the sustainability education space,” he said.

It remains important to have disciplinary knowledge and subject-matter expertise, such as how energy systems work. “But we need to go beyond that and also work more in groups, and help students navigate different types of knowledge so they are able to act and not be paralysed in light of the challenges we see.

“These transdisciplinary approaches will become much stronger in the education space in the coming decades,” he explained.

Sustainability is embedded in education across fields at Leuphana University Lüneburg. In first year, all students study together, and there is a focus on sustainability. Students work in groups of five on transdisciplinary research projects.

“They have to come up with a research question, ideally in collaboration with stakeholders. They have to produce knowledge and research insights, but also practical solutions to a problem. The students go through this research cycle throughout their first semester,” Fischer explained.

In later years, there are courses that are complementary to students' major and minor subjects that are often focussed on sustainability. Leuphana also has masters and doctoral programmes, with four specialised masters in sustainability.

“Our students are able to see connections between different sectors, different actors, and work with the connections towards a common purpose, bringing people together in processes of collective framing, identifying problems, etcetera. That’s what they are really good at,” he said.

Most sustainability students end up in public administration, the corporate sector or consultancies.

A signature programme at Leuphana is sustainability management for professionals, set up many years ago by Professor Stefan Schaltegger, founder of the Centre for Sustainability Management.

“It is popular, including among people who are very often already on the job. Sustainability managers in different enterprises really want to professionalise,” said Fischer.

The UNESCO chair

One of the many functions of the UNESCO chair is to bring together people who are interested in sustainability in higher education, “who want to move the needle in that space”.

Also important is creating a link to the world of UNESCO which, despite some criticisms, is the only global organisation promoting peace building, sustainable development, and humanistic ideas.

One of Leuphana’s flagship activities is coordinating the UNESCO-UNITWIN network on Education for Sustainable Development and Social Transformation involving six leading universities from Canada, Costa Rica, Germany, Greece and South Africa.

According to its website, the UNESCO chairs and UNITWIN networks support UNESCO’s work and largely comprise different UNESCO chairs and research institutions that join forces to promote a cause.

There are around 1,000 UNESCO chairs, 45 UNITWIN networks in 120 countries, and UNESCO has more than 100 ‘category 2’ research institutes globally.

UNESCO chairs are involved in the networks “from the exploration of emerging issues, through the development of international normative instruments to the implementation of policy recommendations at the national level,” said Fischer.

The networks also bring together partners in academia, civil society, communities and policym`akers to help implement projects.

The UNESCO-UNITWIN network on Education for Sustainable Development and Social Transformation is supported by 50 to 60 institutions globally. One example of its work is a two-year project, Politics4Future, that created courses for students to learn about ESD and political action that ran in the countries involved.

There is also a network comprising the 16 UNESCO chairs located in Germany, which meets annually to collaborate and to consult with the German Commission for UNESCO. The chairs are in a range of areas of UNESCO work, such as in hydrology and cultural arts as well as education for sustainable development (ESD).

“In October, we’re running an international UNESCO chairs conference,” Fischer said. “Our idea is to provide a UNESCO chair’s perspective on where we stand with the SDGs, because it’s half-time. Where should we invest our efforts? What have we achieved?

“On the second day of the conference, we will talk about what the SDGs mean for education. Is it enough to just teach about the SDGs, or do we need to transform education more radically, more holistically, to really help learners to make progress, to impact the SDG agenda?”

Leuphana as a learning organisation

In the corporate sense, a learning organisation has learning at its core and is innovative and adaptable to change. Is Leuphana one? “Yes”, said Fischer.

He gave sustainability reporting as a good example of learning organisation practice, because there are targets that the university commits to and reports on. Not achieving targets or changing targets along the way is a characteristic of a learning process.

The university is wanting to expand this learning aspect of how it works, being open about failed initiatives and approaches and collectively sharing lessons learned. “That is one instrument that I put a lot of hope in, to propel forward this idea of a learning organisation within Leuphana,” he said.

Another example Fischer gave is in the sustainability degree programmes, in which students have a semester to spend on a transdisciplinary research project.

“The idea reflects that of a learning organisation in the sense that we don’t have a blueprint as lecturers for how these projects should be. It’s not only about training students to do it right, but also about challenging them to pick topics and find research questions and approaches that really help us also to cover new ground. It’s a bold mission,” he added.

Transdisciplinarity happens inevitably when working with stakeholders in the city “to hear about their problem, to reframe the problem from an academic perspective, and to come up with a design that allows us to meet the needs of both worlds. These projects, which have been running for 10 or more years, create a learning spirit”, he stated.

Under Germany’s Zukunftsstadt – Cities of the Future 2030 – initiative, Leuphana ran projects connected to the SDGs idea, working closely with the city of Lüneburg. “Students worked with city stakeholders to promote sustainability ideas within the city,” Fischer said. “These are some of the activities that reflect the learning spirit of the university.”

The module that Fischer teaches is very different to a decade ago. The sustainability imperative ramped up with Friday For Future, the global youth climate strike movement that kicked off in 2018 after a three-week protest in front of Sweden’s parliament by young activists including Greta Thunberg.

“The younger generation is much more alert and anxious about sustainability, and you really have different challenges now. It’s a continuous learning journey, which is also time consuming. And it takes a lot of resources to constantly negotiate and renegotiate and redo and realign.”

Finally, he said, a whole school approach is key. Sustainability is not delegated to just education degree programmes but is taken onto different levels by different actors, which requires a lot of coordination. “This is part of the process of being a learning organisation,” he said.

At the European level, Fischer told University World News, the urgency of climate change has been trickling down to the economic sector. “Industries understand that this is something that they cannot just do as a goodwill token.

“I see this as a symbiotic development. We have moved into the sustainability space and have stayed there, developing a profile and growing how many students we graduate.

“I’m curious to see what the next 10 or 20 years will bring, with other universities now starting sustainability educational offers, and also how job profiles will change,” he said.

Email Karen MacGregor: macgregor.karen@gmail.com.