Sustainable Education and Approaches

Education in diverse forms and multiple contexts allows each generation to pass on its culture, discoveries, successes, and failures to the next. Without inter-generational education, very little in a human context can be sustainable. Education is also important in formulating, challenging, and disseminating ideas, knowledge, skills, and values within communities, from young to not so young, and between communities, nations, and continents.

This is crucial nowadays, where multiple challenges are risking our way of life, mostly due to climate change. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is UNESCO’s response to our planet's urgent challenges. ESD equips people with the knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and behaviors necessary to interact respectfully with the environment, economy, and society. It encourages people to make smart and responsible decisions that help create a better future for everyone. The UNESCO ESD for 2030 program produces and shares knowledge, provides policy guidance and technical support to countries, and implements projects on the ground. It also promotes peer learning and innovation through information, networks, and partnerships. The critical role of education was reconfirmed in 2020 with the formulation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development.

With less than a decade to reach the SDGs, Education for Sustainable Development must be the key to advancing all Sustainable Development Goals. It teaches people to make informed decisions and act, both individually and collectively, to change society and protect the planet. ESD equips people of all ages with the knowledge, skills, capacity, and values needed to address issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, resource overuse, and inequality, impacting people's and the planet's well-being.

However, education also provides the means whereby societies can consolidate and perpetuate ways of knowing, being, and doing that may nurture economies or individual societies or communities but may not be sustainable in other respects. The concept of sustainability demands that we consider long periods, environmental stability, and the needs of people in diverse places and non-human inhabitants. A key challenge is to help scholarly communities distinguish between educational approaches that seek to sustain the ‘unsustainable’ and those that seek something else, whatever that may be. Research about or to promote high-quality education that does not challenge the status quo will not readily find a place within this context.

Accordingly, Section Editors for the section ‘Sustainable Education and Approaches’ are interested in original and scholarly research articles, conceptual articles, review articles, and commentaries that link education to environmental, cultural, economic, and social sustainability and sustainable development.

The section ‘sustainable education and approaches’ welcomes the full range of previously unpublished scholarly communication indicated within the journal’s aims (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/about). Also, in line with this journal’s policy of having no restriction on the overall length of the paper, Section Editors will expect academic communications to be concise, clear, and readable. Authors are advised to use ‘supplementary material’ in their submissions.