Education & sustainable development

Education has in several cases, nationally as well as internationally, been identified as one of the most important factors to sustainable societal development. What is making education in particular that important is the fact that what students learn during their years in theoretical education, they later on will apply in practical terms throughout their whole professional career. Therefore, in February 2006, the Swedish government put the strive for sustainable development as a ruling paragraph in the Higher Education Act.

How much sustainable education does the university have?

The Gothenburg university has a long tradition of education in environment and sustainable development. Already in 1969 the university held its first course in the subject environment. At the Gothenburg university, there are presently 1 776 courses that can be applied for as a stand-alone course, whereof 126 (7.1%) mainly deals with environment and sustainable development. On top of that, there are 226 (12.7%) of the stand-alone courses that, not mainly, but in some significant way, deals with these important topics.

(note: In the page linked to above, one can continue reading specifically about courses dealing with sustainable development by surfing to the link "Kurser med miljö och hållbar utveckling". Programmes are listed under the topic "Program", and are differentiated in two set of lists where the first contains programmes that mainly deals with sustainable development, and the second list contains programmes that partly deals with this topic.)

Labelling sustainable development courses and programmes

In order to simplify finding courses and programmes that include environment and sustainable development, there is a set of symbols that marks the ones that meet up to certain standards.

Course that mainly deals with environment and sustainable development. More than half of the elements of this course regards ecological, economical or social sustainable development.

Course that partially deals with environment and sustainable development. Less than half of the elements of this course regards ecological, economical or social sustainable development.