The main objectives of the project Enhancing Universities’ Sustainability TEaching and Practices through Ecological Footprint (EUSTEPs) are to: 1) educate European university students – thus creating a future generation of environmentally-aware and sustainability-minded proactive European citizens – and the wider higher education community (teaching and administrative staff, and management bodies) on sustainability and related topics; 2) assess and reduce – via a collaborative participatory process involving the whole higher education community – the impact of European Union Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) on the planet’s ecosystems through an advanced use of the Ecological Footprint (EF) concept and associated tools. As education can influence our societies in many ways, the EUSTEPs project ingeniously interweaves conceptual knowledge of environmental, economic and social principles of sustainability with popular digital tools and innovative teaching and learning practices. The project will provide the chance for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to come together to co-develop modules, materials and tools that are later on expected to become the blueprint for teaching and practicing sustainability in HEIs. In line with European Union requests, this new generation of sustainable citizen will contribute to act against climate change, for the transition to a low-carbon, resource-efficient sustainable economy. In the last decade, an increasing number of studies has pointed out the role in altering the dynamics of the planet that humans have played, are playing and will still play in the future, if the unsustainable trends of economies and societies around the world are not inverted. Meanwhile, the education system has gained a central role in easing the transition to a sustainable world and, with the adoption of the UN Agenda 2030 in 2015, it has been linked with 16 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and sustainable, equitable education has become a core objective of SDG target 4.7. Given the EUSTEPs project’s ambition to impact the European society in the long-run, a transnational strategic partnership is convened by bringing together members of the academia and the world-renown leading Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in Ecological Footprint applications and dissemination: under the coordination of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), the University of Aveiro (Portugal), the University of Siena (Italy), the distance-education-based Universidade Aberta (Portugal), and the NGO Global Footprint Network will collaborate to 1) develop, test and scale-up a novel approach to sustainability teaching and learning (and associated teaching materials and MOOC), and 2) equip European universities with a tool to quantify and address the sustainability of their campuses. This cannot be achieved by universities working in isolation; rather, to ensure EU-wide relevance and applicability of the project outputs, the specific needs of different geographical and cultural contexts needs to be taken into consideration from the onset, thus requiring the activities of the EUSTEPs project to be carried out transnationally. EUSTEPs thus sets to directly reach out to at least 400 undergraduate students, 100 master students, 8 PhD students, 25 teaching and 30 administrative staff, and the management bodies of the involved universities (e.g. rectors and directors of departments), as well as indirectly expand this audience to other universities within and outside the European Union via the EUSTEPs web-platform (and all the material therein). The envisioned key outputs of the EUSTEPs project are: • a series of teaching modules customized for the 4 project target groups (students, teaching and administrative staff, and management bodies), which are interactive, innovative and applicable at European level and beyond thus contributing to SDG 4; • a University Footprint Calculator co-developed by academics, PhD students, administrative staff, and NGO representatives through a participatory process. This tool will allow users quantifying university’s unsustainability drivers and initiating a process of lowering the impact of HEI (and of working spaces), thus contributing to SDGs 11, 12, and 13. The ambition of the EUSTEPs project is that its outputs can set the basis for an innovative “learn-by-doing” approach that can be later on disseminated and scaled-up for adoption at the wider European level and beyond. Ultimately, the project will contribute to creating a new generation of sustainable citizens, aware of the implications of personal behavior and trained on sustainability and digital tools, and introducing new professional expertise in the society, and in the future labor market.
The motivation behind the EUSTEPs project was to achieve two main objectives: 1. educate European university students – thus creating a future generation of environmentally-aware and sustainability-minded proactive European citizens – and the wider higher education community (teaching and administrative staff, and management bodies) on sustainability and related topics; 2. assess and reduce – via a collaborative participatory process involving the whole academic community – the impact of European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) on the planet’s ecosystems through an advanced use of the Ecological Footprint (EF) concept and associated tools. EUSTEPs committed to directly reach out to at least 400 undergraduate students, 100 master students, 8 Ph.D. students, 25 teaching and 30 administrative staff, and the management bodies of the involved universities (e.g., rectors and directors of departments), as well as indirectly expand this audience to other universities within and outside the EU-27 via the EUSTEPs web-site (and all the material therein). As explained in the rest of this report, these numbers have been successfully achieved and exceeded.
As education and time spent within Universities can influence our societies in many ways, the EUSTEPs project set to interweave conceptual knowledge of environmental, economic and social principles of sustainability with popular digital tools and innovative teaching and learning practices to address two (2) key needs in the field of Education for Sustainability: 1. The need to train the whole academic community –consisting of students, educators, and administrative staff– on sustainability issues and engage it in identifying solutions to increase the sustainability status of their institutions, which was addressed via the development of educational materials on sustainability and Ecological Footprint (EF) of Universities. 2. The need to understand the level of sustainability of Universities and ways to improve it, which was addressed via the development and implementations of an online tool (calculator) for assessing the Ecological Footprint of Universities, made freely available to all the EU universities. During the past 36 months, all tailored material and tools developed by the EUSTEPs project have been made freely available through the project's website (www.eusteps.eu) in the three languages of the partners, plus English.