Session 8 SDG 4: Rebalancing people, planet and prosperity: ESD as key enabler for the 17 SDGs and Agenda 2030

About the event

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the weaknesses in our education systems and compelled us to innovate to make education systems more resilient to future disruptions. It has focused attention on the key interconnections between societies, economies and environment. SDG 4.7 recognizes the central role of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) to empower and equip people with knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes to take informed decisions needed for the transformational changes for environmental integrity, economic viability and a just society.

UNESCO’s landmark Futures of Education report calls for forging a new social contract for education as a critical step towards reimagining our futures together. It calls for urgent rebalancing of our relationships with each other, nature and with technology, as well as for pedagogies of collaboration, cooperation and solidarity that treasure and sustain diversity and pluralism.

Various initiatives are thus underway to reimagine education to better address the planetary crisis. Building on the global ESD for 2030 framework and its Roadmap, the 2021 Berlin Declaration on ESD, the new UNECE Strategy for ESD implementation framework (2021 – 2030), this roundtable aims to showcase how ESD can help to scale up the role of education to tackle future crisis, reorient learning to empower learners of all ages to act for environmental integrity, economic viability, a more just, equitable society, and a healthy and sustainable planet.

The session highlighted global and regional ESD policy actions, including the upcoming High-Level Education and Environment Ministers meeting in Cyprus, and illustrated how ESD strategies can help advance, amplify, and scale up transformative education for sustainable development and strengthen cooperation between the education, environment and other sectors to prepare learners for the future.