Sustainable development seems to be the rational goal we should be pursuing on a finite planet. But when we were growing in the early years, global population was small, resources seemingly boundless and the prospects for growth unstoppable.

As we grew on that seemingly glorious trajectory, we inched closer to the realization of that finiteness – rapidly exhausting our natural capital in a way that innovation cannot keep pace, fueling conflict and violence through that scarcity, and nurturing inequalities within and across nations. The global population is growing at an unprecedented rate, with an expectation of growth and narrowly defined prosperity that our future simply cannot sustain.

Sustainability, therefore, can no longer remain a complementary adjunct to our discourse on development. It must replace it.

The collective responsibility for our world

Human beings, for the first time have a determining influence on the Earth’s natural systems which in the past was a factor of geological epochs. We are becoming a geological force of change that Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen popularized as the antrhopocene. If we are collectively responsible for the survival of our world, the sustainability of our actions must become intuitive to our policies, behaviors, and what we teach the next generation.

Recognizing these changes and the need for action, the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development was initiated in 2005. The idea that education is the way to shape the values, skills and knowledge required to build sustainable societies has underpinned the Decade, which UNESCO has been leading.

What have we achieved over the past decade?

We are now in 2014. The main question going ahead will be: what have we achieved, and has education for sustainable development affected behavioral and policy change for sustainable development? These are some of the questions, which countries will seek answers when they meet in Nagoya, Japan this week to conclude the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.

The recent UNESCO report, Shaping the Future We Want” (PDF), prepared for the Nagoya conference identified four major categorical advancements:

• Enabling sustainable development;
• Galvanizing pedagogical innovation;
• The response of political leadership; and
• the spread of education for sustainable development (ESD) across all levels and areas of education.

While the Decade has seen significant ESD progress, much remains to be done in order to mainstream ESD into all areas of education and learning. The UNESCO report has identified a number of remaining formidable challenges ESD faces as it enters the next decade and what the Global Action Program—the follow up to the Decade on Education for Sustainable Development—needs to address. These are:

• Closer alignment and coherence across education and sustainable development sectors
• Political support for institutionalizing ESD to ensure implementation of ESD on a systemic level;
• Better Knowledge: More research, innovation, monitoring and evaluation for the effectiveness of ESD and subsequently on the adoption of sustainable development as the core development paradigm.

Every student needs to learn about sustainable development

These challenges are non-trivial. ESD to a large extent has been treated as a separate component within education systems. However, it has been argued in recent years that sustainable development needs to be embedded within main stream disciplines at all levels of education.

This requires a systemic change in all kind of textbooks, including science, math, technology, social sciences and humanities.

ESD forms part of a larger effort of states and societies to use education as an agent of transformation. Different components of it – ethics, civics, peace education, human rights education, critical thinking, skills for cooperation, and global citizenship education – all contribute to educating for a more peaceful and sustainable world.

A more effective transformative education for the future will be based on better interface between all these components.

Economic growth needs to align with sustainable development

The second major challenge is to align policies at the macro level. It is a contraction to support ESD policies while at the same time pursuing economic growth policies that are unsustainable. We treat ESD as a “luxury” during times when resources are available and the economy is growing. But sustainable development should not be an afterthought for when countries have solved their problems of basic needs and poverty reduction. It needs to be integrated all along.

Better pedagogy needed

The third major challenge is the development of new pedagogies that are more suitable and aligned with the principles of sustainability. 

Sustainable development needs to be part of core literacy, just as reading and writing.

The Global Action Program which has identified five focus areas in the follow up to the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, has the potential to address some of these challenges but only with careful and strategic design. The five areas of the Global Action Plan are:

• Advancing policy;
• Integrating sustainability practices into education and training environments (whole-institution approaches);
• Increasing the capacity of educators and trainers;
• Empowering and mobilizing youth; and
• Encouraging local communities and municipal authorities to develop community-based ESD programs.

Key lessons learned

The key lesson we must learn from the past decade is that we can’t keep ESD policy separate from other policies, which are either related to sustainable development or have an impact on sustainable development.

We will know how successful ESD is, when we witness actual changes in other sectoral policies towards sustainable development and changing lifestyles and behavior. Until we see this trend emerge, results can only be partial. But it has only been a decade and changing behaviors and values systems takes more than a generation.

These challenges are complex and the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education on Peace and Sustainable Development, which I lead promotes transformative learning for this societal transformation. We are developing a set of activities to build the capacity of individuals to transform information to knowledge and action by embedding psychological, convictional and behavioral aspects into the formal and informal education systems.

Dr. Anantha Duraiappah is an economist and the Director of the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education on Peace and Sustainable Development.