(Higher) Education for Sustainable Development at Leuphana University Lüneburg

The Leuphana University Lüneburg is one of Germany’s leading universities in terms of advancing and institutionalizing “sustainability”, both in its own academic programs and in the area of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary environmental and sustainability research.
The consistent implementation of higher education for sustainable development (ESD) is one of the university’s distinguishing features. Across all levels of education and in all types of schools (college, graduate school, professional school), Leuphana University not only bears witness to the emergence of specialized experts in sustainability science, but also to the development of sustainability-relevant knowledge and competencies as an integral part of a university education.

In its own professional school, which offers practice-orientated training programs in various different forms to meet the demands of heterogeneous target groups (e.g. managers in companies or journalists), Leuphana University has managed to integrate the topic of sustainability in the context of lifelong learning. Furthermore, it can draw on vast expertise when it comes to scaling such courses because Leuphana University has years of logistical and didactic experience in developing academic programs. These include sessions for smaller learning groups and also larger sessions with up to 1,600 students that are held for all of the university’s freshmen in, among others, the sustainability-oriented module “Wissenschaft trägt Verantwortung” (Responsibility and Sustainability).

With regard to ESD the university has been working closely with UNESCO for many years now, among other things, through the UNESCO Chair in “Higher Education for Sustainable Development” (since 2005), and as a key partner in the ongoing Global Action Program “Education for Sustainable Development”.
 

► Website of the Faculty of Sustainability