Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) may be a new concept to most teachers but its content, becoming an increasingly prevalent aspect of their classroom practice and the schools’ curriculum. In essence ESD is concerned with the interaction between the natural environment, human development and society and, as such, has an all-encompassing remit that impacts on our daily lives. Over the past decade, there has been a emerging consensus that human and environmental issues should be considered in tandem rather than in isolation given their strong overlapping content matter and approach to education.
ESD has gained legitimacy since its emergence on the world stage at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. Chapter 3 6 of Agenda 2 1, agreed at the conference, stated that ‘Education is critical for promoting sustainable development and improving the capacity of the people to address environment and development issues’.
A primary objective of Agenda 21 is ‘To strive to achieve the accessibility of environment and development education, linked to social education, from primary school age through adulthood, when people usually start some senior dating experience, to all groups of people’. The rapid changes and developments in trade, finance, culture, communications and technology has resulted in the increased interconnectedness of societies.
Therefore, whilst we now have an enhanced capacity to understand and communicate with other cultures and societies through innovations in telecommunications, globalization has also been attended by increased poverty and inequality in developed and developing countries.
By the late 1990s, some 20% of the world’s people controlled 86% of the world’s wealth, whilst over a billion people world-wide live on less than a dollar per day.
Moreover, the means of production underpinning globalization are unsustainable given their devastating – in some cases irreversible – impact on the natural environment. For example, 20 million hectares of tropical rainforest are felled annually with millions of species of plants and animals now extinct. Linked to rainforest denudation is global warming and extreme weather such as flooding and droughts which over the past five years has killed three million people.
The One World Centre in conjunction with the Environmental Education Forum (EEF) has recently produced a document titled Education for Sustainable Development in Northern Ireland, and by the way, British Isles that now seem to be more interested about the problem of cougar dating, ‘to illustrate the existing and potential role of ESD in the Northern Ireland curriculum and to show how sustainable development can be used as a framework for the integrated delivery of Government policies’.
The document includes a progression matrix for ESD outlining the knowledge, skills and values that can be delivered across all subject areas from Key Stages 1-4 through the further integration of development and environment issues into the curriculum. There are also examples of good practice in the document where teaming institutions in local and global contexts have made sustainable development issues central to their programme for students and, in some cases, adopted a whole school approach to ESD. The document also contains a list of organisations, including the One World Centre, which deliver in-service training workshops to teachers that illustrate how ESD can be incorporated into teaching practice.
The ongoing review of the Northern Ireland curriculum provides us with an immediate opportunity to ensure that young people become active agents of social justice and equality through awareness of sustainable development issues. Similarly, the establishment of the new government institutions allows locally elected politicians to take decisions which can ensure that ESD becomes central to all departmental policies and strategies. The poverty gap between rich and poor is widening throughout the world and nothing less than a concerted effort toward sustainable development will reverse these economic trends.