Award for the "Sustainability at Brandenburg Universities" working group

On 24 September, a total of 25 successful initiatives promoting education for sustainable development (ESD) were honoured. One of these is the working group for sustainability at Brandenburg's universities which is led by the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE).

Sustainable university landscape
Brandenburg as a location for a diverse sustainability programme - this is the vision of the award-winning working group. It pursues the goal of anchoring education for sustainable development in the long-term awareness of all university members in teaching, research, transfer and management. To this end, they organise cross-university activities: Anchoring the topic of sustainability in mission statements and curricula as well as further developing training programmes and coaching. "We would like to thank everyone involved for this great honour and recognition. A big thank you goes in particular to the representatives of the universities themselves, who are very committed to bringing the topic of sustainability to their universities," says Dr Jennifer Krah, who heads the coordination office together with Prof. Dr Heike Molitor (technical director) and Julian Reimann (research assistant).

The working group was founded at the beginning of 2020. Employees from the (vice) presidencies, central institutions and departments of Brandenburg's eight state universities contribute their extensive experience to the working group. A coordination office based at HNEE provides support through accompanying research and organisational work. In a recently published annual report interested parties can read in detail which measures have been pursued to date.

Background to the award
The projects were honoured by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research together with the German Commission for UNESCO in a digital ceremony. The background to the award is the UNESCO programme "Education for Sustainable Development: Towards achieving the SDGs" programme - or "ESD 2030" for short. It is the global framework programme for the implementation of ESD in the period from 2020 to 2030. UNESCO wants to use the programme to help achieve the Agenda 2030 with its 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and thus create a fairer and more sustainable world.

Note on image material
The photos available here may be used for reporting purposes. Please note the copyright notice © HNEE / Nachhaltigkeit an Brandenburger Hochschulen