COPERNICUS Alliance

Associate Professor Živilė Stankevičiūtė of Kaunas University of Technology, School of Economics and Business, Lithuania, benefitted from the voucher offered by Marilyn Mehlmann on the occasion of the COPERNICUS Alliance Online Conference in 2019: Živilė attended a five-day workshop in Croatia in February 2020, followed by three months of online interaction to improve her transformative learning skills. Read her report on the event!

With the “Campus Planeta Plan” the University of the Basque Country strives for a healthy and sustainable environmental management policy in the framework of the EHUagenda 2030 for sustainable development. This plan aims to be a model for the whole university community to adopt new life and consumption habits in everyday practice at each campus.

The journal Frontiers in Sustainability recently launched a new section on Sustainable Organizations. This section offers opportunities to publish innovative and challenging papers. Interested researchers can get involved as authors or in other roles.

Virtual education has unexpectedly become a global necessity these days. The open source publication "Virtual conferences in higher education: Teasing out their transformative potential for sustainable development" provides insights into this topic.

With the foundation of the Centre for Professors Emeriti and retired higher education teachers, the University of Maribor breaks new ground in this field. Prof. Peter Glavič was elected head of the newly established centre, which will operate at the Rectorate of the University of Maribor. The aim is to close the intergenerational gap and show due honor to Professors Emeriti and retired higher education teachers. 

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Our colleagues from the University of Warsaw critically reflect on the implementation of a newly established interdisciplinary Sustainable Development graduate programme. One of the positive aspects raised is the high rate of foreign students enrolled, which enhances the intercultural approach of the programme and enriches academic discussions. A key challenge noted by the authors is the complexity of coordinating teaching by colleagues from eight university faculties.

Virtual events bear a huge potential to contribute to sustainable development by bridging geographical gaps on a global scale while reducing CO₂ emissions. Building on experience garnered during the COPERNICUS Alliance Online Conference 2019, we developed guidelines on how to prepare, host and evaluate virtual conferences.

With their EHUagenda 2030 for sustainable development the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) has provided a blueprint to bring their work in line with the SDGs and to find sustainable environmental, social and economic solutions to global problems. Over the last three years the university's scientific contribution to the SDGs has increased hugely.

Just founded at the University of Bern, the Wyss Academy for Nature promises to become a leading research and practice centre in the field of nature and people. Scientific teams will work with practitioners and representatives from policy, business, and civil society to develop innovations for the protection and sustainable use of nature across four continents. Made possible by philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss, the Wyss Academy is a joint endeavour of CDE, the Oeschger Centre, and the Institute of Plant Sciences, all of the University of Bern. CDE Director Peter Messerli has been designated to lead the new centre.

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The WU Vienna Center for Sustainability Transformation and Responsibility (STaR) hosted its first panel discussion at the WU Matters WU Talks public lecture series, titled “The UN Sustainable Development Goals: Why Should They be Your Business?” The event attracted a highly diverse audience of nearly 350 students, faculty and staff, business practitioners, locals and internationals. The issues tackled by the panelists concerned the ways in which SDGs can be embedded into different business models, the differences between the SDG framework and other means of fostering corporate responsibility, SDG communication, measuring SDG impact, and the thorny topic of “SDG-washing”.

The WU Vienna Center for Sustainability Transformation and Responsibility (STaR) organized the 1^st Research Conference on Responsible Innovation (22-23 November 2019, Vienna). The two-day conference brought together internationally recognized scholars from various fields and disciplines to reflect on the nature, drivers, and outcomes of Responsible Innovation.

The 2019 GSDR, entitled “The Future is Now: Science for Achieving Sustainable Development”, was unveiled at the United Nations in New York on Wednesday, 11 September 2019. Drafted by an independent group of 15 scientists co-chaired by CDE Director Peter Messerli (University of Bern), the report finds that the current development model is not sustainable, and the progress made in the last two decades is in danger of being reversed through worsening social inequalities and potentially irreversible declines in the natural environment that sustains us. The scientists conclude that a far more optimistic future is still attainable, but only by drastically changing development policies, incentives, and actions.

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The first multiplier event of the project "Education for Zero Waste and Circular Economy (EduZWaCE)" was held in the Congress Centre Bernardin in Portorož on 24 October 2019. 50 participants from universities, research institutes, enterprises, decision makers and postgraduate students discussed about possibilities and future efforts to improve the upcoming Vocational Education and Training (VET) online program "Education for Zero Waste and Circular Economy" and current developments in this field.

The seminar took place on 9 October 2019 in Bizkaia Aretoa (Bilbao). It analysed how the environmental and social footprint of the University of the Basque Country could be reduced. Materials and videos are available.

The BOKU University for Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna, together with the University of Hamburg and the University of Zurich, organised a workshop on "Universities and Sustainable Development Goals", which was supported by a CA Micro Fund. It took place on 11 September 2019 as part of the Pre-Conference of the SBE19 (Sustainable Built Environment D-A-CH Conference 2019) at the Graz University of Technology, Austria.

The University of Bern is currently developing a comprehensive strategy for reducing its CO₂ emissions caused by business travel. As a first step, the Executive Board of the University has issued recommendations on how employees can make business travel more sustainable.

Based on a survey, the University of Gävle, in cooperation with the Autonomous University of Madrid, investigated sustainability being taught, sustainability competences developed, and pedagogical approaches used at European Higher Education Institutions. 

The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) announced the paper “Mainstreaming Education for Sustainable Development at a Swiss University: Navigating the Traps of Institutionalization” by author Lilian Trechsel (researcher at the Centre of Development and Environment, University of Bern) as a finalist for the 2019 AASHE Sustainability Awards in the Campus Sustainability Research category for outstanding research in sustainability.