Teaching and Learning for a Sustainable Future

How changes in the ways we learn are going to change the way how we think? Education for Sustainable Development aims at achieving this by making key issues related to sustainable development such as poverty alleviation, climate change, sustainable production and consumption, biodiversity loss part of education.

While millions of people of different ages around the world still don’t have access to education, ESD focusses on enabling people in and out of schools to develop much-needed skills. Those skills will help them improve the quality of their lives and to take action for ensuring better life quality for the coming generations.
Financial resources, legal frameworks, and technological efficiency are crucial to sustainability, yet nothing helps more than a mindset/behavior change.

How can you contribute to promoting ESD?

Every day we see a considerable number of ideas and projects submitted to our competitions that champion SDG 4: Quality Education. They not only focus on increasing access to education and skills acquisition, and on promoting lifelong learning, but also on teacher education.

The solutions that they propose are relevant to global problems. The latter not only are human-generated issues but at the same time, they’re too complex and intractable to unravel. To solve them, it is required that the environmental, social, economic, and many other approaches are involved in the education curricula.

First, children and youth need to understand how those complex issues are connected. No one can provide a solution to a specific problem by focusing only on that issue because it can be related to many other problems, and it is a problem in other parts of the world. There is a need to think globally. The fact that a problem is affecting a country on the other side of the planet doesn’t mean that it isn’t our problem. A sustainable world is possible through local action and cooperation. Trained teachers can help them do it.

ESD helps to shape informed and trained groups of people of different ages that can bring social, and political changes for sustainable development.

No matter what goal your idea or project champions, you can contribute to education for sustainable development.
Remember that education is a human right that has the power to transform the world.
ESD has the potential to change attitudes and behaviors through training, know-how, skills acquisition, creativity, and inventiveness.

If you are interested in entrepreneurship, you can take the free online training provided by the Entrepreneurship Campus, and share what you learn with other people that don’t have access internet access or don’t speak English. The online courses help to create a mindset that can be implemented everywhere where change and progress are needed.

If you have an idea or run a project that champions the SDG or sustainable development in the travel and tourism sectors, there is still time to join our competitions.