Environmental Education and Educating for Sustainable Development

UNESCO's lead agency role in the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development builds on the long-term concern of the Organization for issues related to environmental education and sustainability. Key environmental-education events and activities have included a charter on environmental education resulting from an international workshop in Belgrade in 1975, an intergovernmental conference on environmental education held in Tbilisi in 1977, the UNESCO-UNEP International Programme on Environmental Education (IIEP, 1975-1995), and the adoption by the 1992 Rio Earth Summit of Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 on education, public awareness and training for sustainable development, for which UNESCO served as interagency task manager. During the 1990s, a primary focus for UNESCO work on Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 was provided by the transdisciplinary programme Educating for a Sustainable Future, launched in 1994 on an experimental intersectoral basis. Among the products of the programme, Teaching and Learning for a Sustainable Future is a multimedia teacher education programme prepared and published by UNESCO as a contribution to the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. The underlying motivation is to help reorient teacher education towards sustainable development, in order to empower the world's 60 million teachers to become key agents of change. The programme contains 100 hours (25 modules) of professional development for use in pre-service teacher courses as well as the in-service education of teachers, curriculum developers, education policy-makers, and authors of educational materials. In its role as task manager for Chapter 36 of Agenda 21, UNESCO also prepared a stock-taking report for the Johannesburg Summit in 2002 on 'Education for Sustainability – From Rio to Johannesburg: Lessons Learnt from a Decade of Commitment'. At Johannesburg, this stock-taking review was among the inputs to a parallel event on Educating for a Sustainable Future: Action, Commitments and Partnerships. The event was organized jointly by UNESCO and the Government of South Africa's Ministry of Education, in co-operation with the NGO UNESCO Liaison Committee (which groups over 300 international NGOs competent in the fields of education, science, culture and communication and accredited to UNESCO). The objectives of the parallel event were fourfold: to take up education at all levels and in all its forms as indispensable for achieving sustainable development; to draw political attention at the highest levels to the vital role of education in building a sustainable future; to provide an opportunity for those at the World Summit interested in education to come together to pave the way for future action, including the WSSD Plan of Implementation; to emphasize partnerships and commitments to future action, consistent with the purpose of the Summit. For UNESCO, one of the most positive outcomes of the Johannesburg summit was a recommendation to the UN General Assembly that "it consider adopting a Decade of Education for Sustainable Development starting in 2005". Subsequently, in December 2002, the General Assembly decided through Resolution A./RES/57/254 to proclaim the ten-year period beginning on 1 January 2005 as the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. UNESCO was designated as the lead agency in the promotion of the Decade, and in this respect was charged with developing an international implementation scheme and establish its relationship with the various educational processes already in existence, especially the Dakar Framework of Action adopted at the World Education Forum and the UN Literacy Decade. The overall objective of the implementation scheme – which has been developed in consultation with a wide range of interested bodies and stakeholders – is to provide recommendations for governments on how to promote and improve the integration of education for sustainable development in their respective educational strategies and action plans at the appropriate level. Further information is accessible through the UNESCO website for the Decade.