COPERNICUS Alliance

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).

The Center for a Sustainable University fosters sustainable development at Universität Hamburg in research, teaching, education, and administration. It has recently launched two innovative initiatives that aim to address the SDGs institutionally: the SDG Ambassador Programme and the Digital Sustainability Maps.

In the past months, the “European Virtual Seminar on Sustainable Development” (EVS) once again provided a unique learning sustainability experience. Almost 20 years after its creation, the EVS continues to be an innovative e-learning course. It fosters international and multidisciplinary exchange between staff and students who collaborate through ICT. The organizational model of the EVS is based on a flexible network of universities (including four CA members) who invest staff and resources and recruit students.

International Women’s Day is an opportunity to consider how women are advancing the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development in higher education. The COPERNICUS Alliance would like to celebrate contributions to the SDGs made by women working and studying in our member institutions – while also calling for action to accelerate moves to achieve gender balance across the higher education system and all other institutions.

The COPERNICUS Alliance invited its members to meet for a “Vision-and-Action Workshop” in Girona from 31 January to 1 February 2019. The purpose of the meeting was to convene past, present, and future CA members and the Advisory Board to envision the future of CA, design project ideas for the Erasmus+ call or other calls with expert support, build partnerships, and strategize about funding.

Supporting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has become a key priority for the Conference of Spanish University Rectors (CRUE) – the most influential higher education association in Spain, composed of 76 universities. Through the adoption of a whole institution approach, it has recently established an Inter-sectoral Committee for the 2030 Agenda that will examine policies and programmes to identify existing opportunities to implement the SDGs effectively in the Spanish higher education system.

The University of Warsaw has just announced the launch of a brand-new Master in Sustainable Development that will start in the next academic year. Students will cover a wide range of exciting and cutting-edge topics embracing the complexity of sustainability challenges and will gain the leadership skills needed to design solutions and facilitate change in different types of communities and organisations.

15 Austrian universities have recently founded the UniNEtZ network with experts from social and natural sciences, technology, arts and music to tackle the SDGs. Universities have taken responsibility to work on the SDGs in a transdisciplinary approach, to reflect the complexity of the SDG framework. CA member University of Graz, represented by RCE Graz-Styria, is the focal point of “SDG 11: Inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities and human settlements”.

Do you remember the Future Forward Summit in Brussels in October 2018? Check out the conference website to download keynote and workshop presentations, decide what to read next by choosing a book of the online conference library, and relive the best moments of the event in photos.  

► www.futureforwardsummit.com  

With approximately 180 participants over four days of interactive, creative workshops, diverse panel sessions, keynotes, brain-walks and field trips, the HSDS was an inspiring, energising and thought-provoking event, brilliantly organised by a helpful, professional team whom we heartily thank for their excellent work! Now you can access materials from the Summit online.

The COPERNICUS Alliance Conference 2016 focused on the sustainability transformation of institutional, national and international science systems. It reflected on policies and practices that support or hinder researchers and educators of higher education institutions to practice inter- and transdisciplinary approaches of sustainability science.