COPERNICUS Alliance

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. 

The Educating Future Change Agents (EFCA) project, a joint research initiative of Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany and Arizona State University, USA has been conducting research since 2016 which seeks to collect empirical evidence on how key competencies in sustainability can be effectively developed. A team of researchers has carried out an integrated and innovative multi-case study design at both universities and initial results are beginning to be published.

The Sustainability Office of the University of the Basque Country has launched a new website that includes all the programmes and actions carried out by the university to meet the Agenda 2030. This website presents the university’s specific contributions to 12 of the 17 SDGs. In addition to these 12 SDGs, the University has included its commitment to language and cultural diversity through SDG 17+1.

Ahead of the UN Climate Action Summit on 23 September 2019, networks and institutions working in Further and Higher Education, including the CA, are coming together to add their support to this letter that will be shared with key government officials and the media before the summit.

Prof. Michel Ricard, ESD UNESCO Chair at Bordeaux INP (Institut National Polytechnique), France, invited CA President Anne Zimmermann to present the COPERNICUS Alliance at the 3rd International Conference of the chair, entitled “Education for Sustainable Development, a Transition Lever for our Societies”. This was an opportunity to establish contacts with some higher education institutions in France and present to them the COPERNICUS Alliance’s new Vision, Mission, and Action Plan.

Under the title “Skilled migrants in Austria: Needed but unwelcome?”, the WU Vienna Competence Center for Sustainability Transformation and Responsibility (STaR) hosted its first public panel discussion on 10 April. The event owed its inspiration to the ongoing research on migration at WU Vienna, where several groups of researchers across different academic disciplines are working on topics related to this important issue.

In this piece of news, Beatriz Perez-Soto shares her experiences with sustainable education and tourism as Visiting Professor at Universidad Metropolitana of Ecuador (UMET).

Charles University Environment Centre held the launch meeting of the project "Sustainable Local Development – Linking Theory and Practice" on 28 March, in cooperation with the National Network of Local Action Groups for local development and the University of South Bohemia.

Charles University in cooperation with RCE Czechia co-organised an event entitled “Our Common Present” to initiate a dialogue on SDG 12 ("Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns") in the Czech Republic.

UZH has approved an ambitious whole-institutional sustainability policy and released its first sustainability report. Furthermore, the University has published a new transparency list of third-party funding sources and signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).