Sustainability requires revamped HE curriculum – UN forum

Heads nodded in agreement when Borhene Chakroun, interim director of UNESCO’s Division for Policies and Lifelong Learning Systems, said: “Higher education is at an inflection point.”

In his opening remarks to the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI) 2026 Global Forum, he warned that expectations of higher education “have never been greater”.

The number of students in universities has doubled over the past two decades to just under 270 million, which has required universities and governments to ensure “quality, equity and inclusion”.

At the same time universities find themselves “navigating profound transformations driven by technological innovation, including artificial intelligence (AI), demographic changes, climate change, growing inequalities and geopolitical uncertainty”.

He said universities are increasingly called upon not only to educate future generations and undertake advanced research, but also to help societies anticipate change, respond to crises, and contribute to sustainable solutions.

“We have to be bold, colleagues. As UNESCO has consistently affirmed, higher education is a public good and public responsibility,” Chakroun told the 19 speakers and respondents and some 250 who watched virtually the session held on Thursday 9 June.

At a time when multilateralism faces political opposition and financial constraints, for example, the United States has withdrawn from UNESCO and other international organisations and budget cuts have forced many American universities to end their international projects, Chakroun, speaking in the United Nations headquarters in New York, pointed his flashlight in the opposite direction.

“Multilateralism [operates] not only at the highest political level,” he said. “It’s also among institutions, among networks like the HESI network,” which, since its founding in 2012, has developed into a network of more than 1,100 universities, higher education networks, student associations, UNESCO and other UN agencies.

It is chaired by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), the UN University, the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC), and the Sulitest Association – a non-profit organisation and online platform aimed at improving sustainability literacy for all.

In a recorded presentation, Shinobu Yume Yamaguchi, who directs the Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability at the UN University (UNU, Tokyo), highlighted one of the challenges faced by the speakers and their universities in beginning to plan for 2030 and the renewal of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – the fact that only 15% of the SDG goals set for 2030 are on track, a decline of 3 percentage points from last year.

“Not a single one of the 17 SDGs is fully on track to be achieved by 2030 at the current rate of progress,” she said. At the present rate of graduating students trained through and working to fulfil the SDGs, by 2030, 80% of the positions requiring “green skills” could remain unfilled.

Higher education must change, because “it is just not possible to solve tomorrow’s crisis using yesterday’s education models”, said Yamaguchi.

Curriculum change needed

Several speakers spoke to Yamaguchi’s call for curriculum revision, including Professor Subarna Sivapalan, associate dean of Research and Knowledge Exchange, at the University of Nottingham Malaysia (Semenyih).

“In January of this year, our Ministry of Education and Higher Education launched the Higher Education Blueprint. This blueprint has sustainability as well as planetary health as a key strategic trust.”

Further, she said, the associate dean of research and professors are “excited to integrate this within teaching, learning and research”.

Integral to this reimagined curriculum, Sivapalan said, is the inclusion of “traditional indigenous and local knowledge” in order to make “the local context more understandable for the students”.

Cherifa Abdelbaki, UNESCO Chair for Sustainable Development and Resilience at the University of Tlemcen in Chetouane, Algeria, said that “every university decision should be evaluated through the lens of environmental sustainability, social inclusion and [developing] long-term resilience” – and that sustainability should be embedded across all disciplines.

“Sustainable development is not only the responsibility of environmental scientists. Future engineers must design resilient infrastructure; future economists must understand circular and green economies. This requires interdisciplinary curricula that combine scientific knowledge with systems thinking, critical thinking, ethical leadership, digital competencies, AI literacy and problem-solving skills,” she said.

Ana Margarida Costa, who is both Professor of the Practice of Sustainability and Head of Sustainability at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Thuwal, Saudi Arabia), discussed a very different curricula challenge: transferring the knowledge about sustainability to children, a project undertaken in partnership with the United Nations Development Program, Saudi Arabia and the academic journal Frontiers for Young Minds.

“We challenged our scientists at the university to translate their science for children, so all the research they are doing [is] in a language that they [the children] can understand. The children were the actual reviewers of their work,” she explained.

Costa and her team created a collection for children in which each SDG is embodied in a story, with cartoons and simple language.

While AI was discussed by several speakers, the most detailed contribution came from Head of the School of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster (London) Dr Doug Specht.

He made two interconnected points. First, since universities are being asked by governments and industry how to incorporate AI, the universities have to get the implementation of AI for knowledge production (and processes) right. Yet, “universities are still struggling through our own internal governance structures” and “fragmented legacy systems”.

More specifically on curriculum and knowledge generation, Specht said: “If we layer AI over the top of poor unstructured [legacy] data, that’s where we get biased results.

“That’s where we get false narratives. And so we’re pushing for the idea that to get research equitable, to get research in place where we can do good and productive knowledge exchange and co-creation, we first need to make sure our data infrastructures are suitable and well put together.”

For years, universities have focused on computer and digital access. Now, Specht emphasises, we need to focus on literacy in AI in higher education.

The development of AI has “changed what access and what literacy means . . . our work”, he explained, is on “tiered AI literacy, thinking about governance awareness for leaders, applied skills for staff and for colleagues, and critical evaluation [of AI answers or results] for students,”, he said.

Ratna Lindawati Lubis, professor of economics and business at Teklom University (Bandung, Indonesia) and a member of HESI’s SDG Publisher’s Compact Action Group, raised two points about curriculum.

The first was about how AI translations on open-source platforms afford her students who do not have strong English skills access to materials by “simplifying academic jargon”.

Second, she said that the SDG Publisher’s Compact was working with the academic publisher Cengage to integrate the “one planet framework to ensure sustainability is embedded right at the foundation level” of engineering textbooks.

UNESCO Co-Chair, Katrin Kohl, York University (Toronto, Canada), sounded a note of caution, however, reminding the gathering that AI raises important “sustainability issues” that go beyond one country. For more details, she directed participants to the UNU’s report, Environmental Cost of AI's Energy Use: Carbon, water and land footprints, published in June.

Universities as societal actors

Among the most important themes that speakers in different sessions discussed was what can be called une université engage, which in her talk in the first session, “Transforming higher education for sustainable futures”, Kohl began describing by noting: “We need to understand that we’re not just providers of degrees and information on request.”

Then, pushing back against what in North America seems like the growing threat of universities becoming irrelevant, fuelled in part by the fact that many governments and companies have dropped the entry-level BA requirement, Kohl stated boldly: “We’re societal actors. We are providing learning and research upon request. But we are also employers. We are landholders. We are purchasers. We are conveners. We are community partners. We are conference platforms.”

She added: “And we really need to understand that we have a very, very broad mandate in society and that [mandate] comes with responsibility.”

Though Kohl cast her next point in terms of today’s media/digital ecosphere, she championed a century’s old view of the university as the custodian of knowledge and the transmittal of it to people.

“We are one of the few people and communities left that are perceived as honest brokers of information in times of polarisation and misinformation, and rapid technology changes,” she said.

But engagement also means working in partnership with the community to build the community’s capacity to address key challenges.

In Algeria, Abdelbaki is overseeing a collaboration with the Pan African University (Yaoundé, Cameroon), the Institute for Water, Energy and Climate Change (Tlemcen, Algeria) and stakeholders to promote research and education linked directly to regional challenges, including water security, climate resilience, ecosystem restoration and sustainable resource management.

“We are also collaborating with the different stakeholders; students learn not only in the classroom but also through engagement with the communities, local authorities, and practitioners, transforming the knowledge into practical solutions. This model of co-creation strengthens both learning and social resilience,” said Abdelbaki.

In a later session, “Partnerships that deliver for SDGs 6, 7, 9, 11 and 17,” Satesh Bidaisee, interim dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine at St George’s University (SGU, Grenada), explained that SGU has focused on the One Health programme with partners such as the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, that uses participatory methods to identify key constraints and issues at the animal-human-ecosystem interface and is developing and testing innovative One Health strategies to resolve these problems. It is also training One Health leaders across the region.

Under this programme, the schools of medicine, veterinary medicine, public health and allied health sciences have been “sympatrically” located, so that, as the Caribvet.net website states, they can address zoonotic diseases (that is, that transfer from animals to humans, as Covid is suspected to have done) in a broader and more coordinated manner, at the human-animal-ecosystems interfaces by promoting transdisciplinarity and collaboration across all government sectors and society to reduce significantly health risks.

According to Bidaisse: “We’re able to work on shared research opportunities, working on public health interventions, which supports our students’ training but also capacity building for the island and also our regional partners; meaningful opportunities have developed progressively through partnerships.

“They include strengthening capacity for disease prevention and surveillance, health education, promotion, and workforce preparedness.”

More specifically, according to Caribvet.net, under the One Health programme, students supervised by “clinicians, perform wellness exams, vaccinate, deworm and provide other basic veterinary intervention on both pets and livestock,” while students in the undergraduate nursing programme provide free vision, hearing, blood pressure, blood, paediatric and breast exams.

“The One Health programme’s interdisciplinary approach through partnerships allows for training community partnerships and contributes really to a healthier, more resilient community for Grenada and the Caribbean region,” said Bidaisse.

For her part, Dr Hilma Rantilla Amwele, UNESCO Chair on Sustainable Water Research for Climate Adaptation and Saline Agriculture in Arid Environments, and who teaches at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (Windhoek), spoke about a partnership with the University of South Africa (Pretoria) and Botswana University (Gaborone) to develop short courses on geothermal energy and the development of “green” hydrogen; hydrogen is produced by running an electric current through water H2O, which breaks the bonds between the two hydrogen and the one oxygen atom.

The partnership is in its early days. One youth team from each of the three countries involved has been trained so far. “But the project is ongoing,” she said, and, because of a fourth partner – an international institute she did not name – they will be able to go back into the field to find areas where a geothermal plant could be built.

In addition to the engineering challenges and negotiations among three universities in different countries, Amwele noted that “in the end, we need to go back to the communit[ies] and then look at how this specific green energy production impacts the [local] community. Is it of benefit or not? At the end of the day, can [this] turn into job creation?

“If we find out that it works well, then we create jobs, then the community benefits, then we will go ahead,” she said.

Key role of assessment

Kathleen Ng, co-chair of HESI’s Ratings, Rankings, and Assessments Action Group, reminded the session of the importance of assessment of sustainability initiatives to “highlight the work that higher education institutions are” doing.

It’s “exciting work,” Ng continued, “and we encourage regional and national organisations, especially, to participate.

“We do have lots of engagement from international groups and local groups, but we need more people on board,” she said.

“We need to work with quality assurance and expectation organisations” in order to report on the “weak signals [of initiatives] that were mentioned earlier today that are not currently” in the ratings, rankings and assessments, said Ng.

At Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut, US), explained Melissa Brown, deputy director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, in some cases assessment is being devolved to the universities’ students and with partners around the world in the Global University Climate Forum.

“The idea was to encourage students to develop their own ideas for measurable projects that would yield outputs over the course of six months to a year.”

Dr Dong-Sung Cho, chair of the Development Advisory Committee at the Seoul School of Integrated Science and Technology (SSIST), focused his talk on how the World University Rankings for Innovation (WURI) provide a truer picture of universities and innovation than do traditional rankings such as those published in US News and World Reportor by Times Higher Education.

In part, this is because instead of gathering information from administrators, the WURI rankings use research cases written up by professors, which not only gives data about their research but, also, incentivises them to do more research, said Cho.

Additionally, the WURI rankings plot the research papers on an axis that is a determinant in the university’s final position.

“WURI’s ranking system spans 13 categories, including social responsibility, entrepreneurship, and digital innovation. This broad range enables universities to demonstrate their strengths in specific areas, providing an inclusive space for smaller institutions to shine,” noted an article published in Pressenza, an international online news platform.

“Additionally, the process encourages self-assessment, guiding institutions to identify areas for improvement and growth.”

Sustainable development ‘is survival’

The closest the forum came to a case study was presented by Dr Dameon Black, commissioner, Jamaica Tertiary Education Commission, who began his presentation starkly: “For us here in Jamaica, and certainly for the higher education system and agency that I lead, sustainable development is not an abstract aspiration. It is survival. It’s an imperative. It’s about engendering facilitating solutions and responses that will ensure sustainable futures.”

Over the past two years, hurricanes hitting the island have caused catastrophic damage, impacting 30% of Jamaica’s GDP and threatening water and food production.

Brown chose his words carefully. In Jamaica’s existential crisis, higher education cannot be looked at as just “a sector that supports sustainable development”; rather it is “one of the critical engines through which sustainable development has to be achieved”.

Clean water, energy, infrastructure, cities and health education all depend on the availability of knowledge as well as research and innovation centred in higher education institutions, which can accelerate implementation of solutions.

Universities must, Brown said, “produce locally relevant and globally informed research”, while at the same time working to revamp workforce development.

“Now is not the [time for] the traditional approach to training, educating graduates over a three- or four-year [residential] period. Rather, it is proactively seeking partnerships with institutions, organisations, business enterprises and entrepreneurs in society,” he said.

Noting that Jamaica and the Caribbean have some of the highest energy costs in the world and that they are vulnerable to external energy shocks, Brown pointed to SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy as one of many priorities. “Renewable energy is not only an environmental priority,” he averred; “It is an economic and development necessity.”

Brown closed his talk by saying that the time is long past that higher education institutions can look backwards to the Ivory Tower model. Rather, they must be “flexible and agile, responsive, that is, to the greater demands” now made of them by society.

It is the role of his Jamaica Tertiary Education Commission to define the standards that guide the system so that universities can lead to “greater resilience in the face of climate and economic shocks; greater inclusion, ensuring that we reduce the numbers of persons who are left behind; greater innovation to address development challenges; collaboration across borders and sectors; and to have greater impact” on the lives of individuals because there is often a disconnect between higher education and what communities see benefiting them,” he said.