Education for everyone has always been a very important part of sustainable development. At the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in 2002, countries agreed on a plan called the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPOI). In this plan, they promised to work towards Millennium Development Goal 2, which aimed to make sure every child could go to primary school by 2015. They also supported the Dakar Framework for Action on Education for All, which focused on removing gender inequality in schools by 2005 and at all levels of education by 2015.
The JPOI also said that schools should include lessons about sustainable development—not just in formal schools but also in non-formal learning and everyday education.
Today, more and more people around the world agree that Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is an important part of good education and plays a big role in achieving sustainability. In 2014, the Muscat Agreement was signed at the Global Education for All Meeting (GEM), and it supported this idea. The UN’s Open Working Group on SDGs also added ESD to its education goals for after 2015.
One of the main goals, Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), is to “make sure everyone gets a fair and high-quality education and can keep learning throughout life.” This goal has several smaller targets, and ESD is part of those targets.
The idea of ESD became well-known globally after the report Our Common Future came out in 1987. It defined sustainable development as “meeting the needs of today without stopping future generations from meeting their needs.”
Education was also recognized as key to sustainable development at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, through Agenda 21, especially in Chapter 36.
Later, in 2012, the importance of including sustainability in education was highlighted again in a UN document called The Future We Want, during the Rio+20 conference.
In 2005, UNESCO started the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014). This program confirmed that education can help people learn values and actions that support sustainability and help create better societies. The final report of this program, called Shaping the Future We Want, was shared at the UNESCO World Conference on ESD in Nagoya, Japan, in 2014.
Before the Rio+20 conference, a group of UN organizations created the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI). This group encouraged colleges and universities to teach and research sustainability, make their campuses eco-friendly, and help their communities. HESI grew to include about 300 universities worldwide and made up more than one-third of all promises made during the Rio+20 conference. It gave schools a way to connect directly with global sustainability discussions.
17 SDG Malaysia supports this mission by helping raise awareness, taking action, and building partnerships to promote education for sustainable development across all levels in Malaysia.
