Education for Sustainable Development

‘Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable – to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’

Our Common Future (The Brundtland Report) –

Report of the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development

The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014) was initiated at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, where everybody present agree

d that sustainable development was nothing more than an interesting idea without education.
Education is a crucial tool for achieving sustainability. Most people would agree that the current economic trends are not sustainable and public awareness, education, and training are key to moving society nearer to being sustainable. Beyond this there is very little agreement. Is the meaning of sustainable development within reach? What do sustainable societies look like? How will they function? Why has the government not developed sustainability in schools? The amount of disagreement has handicapped efforts to move education of sustainable development forward.

‘Education for sustainable development is a life-wide and life-long learning endeavour which challenges individuals, institutions and societies to view tomorrow as a day that belongs to all of us, or it will not belong to anyone.’ (UNESCO, 2004:9)

An important distinction must be made. There is a difference between education about sustainable development and education for sustainable development. Education about… provides an awareness, whereas education for… is the use of education as a tool to achieve sustainability. The second is the type of education the government wish to use.

Sustainable development is difficult to define. What makes it harder is the fact that it is also continually evolving. One of the first descriptions of sustainable development was created for the Brundtland Commission and states:

"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of thepresent without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987, p 43).The general thought is that sustainable development has three components: environment, society, and economy. The well-being of these three areas are linked, not separate.

It’s interesting that while we have such a problem defining sustainability, we can easily identify un-sustainability. We can make lists of unsustainable activities; inefficient use of energy, lack of water conservation, overuse of transportation, high amounts of consumerism… But we should not condemn ourselves over our inability to define sustainability; we should work around the problem.

Haigh (2005) stated that Geography was the best subject to teach a module in sustainable development. To a certain extent it is a good idea, as it involves major aspects of geography such as three main ones; environment, society and economy. These three aspects all draw upon traditional geographical techniques. However, sustainable development is such a large subject it draws on other subjects other than just geography and, in my opinion, needs to be a subject of its own, as citizenship now is.

References and Extra Reading:

• Haigh, M., (2005), Geography and the 'European Year of Citizenship through Education. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 29, 173-182
• Some Definitions of Sustainable Development
• Sustainable Development in Government
• A quite simple Encyclopedia of Sustainability