“Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today."^{1
So what is being done to prepare for a sustainable future in the educational realm? This is just the question that the 9th Annual ACTS Conference has been addressing.}

Australasian Campuses Towards Sustainability (ACTS) is a not for profit incorporated association that serves as the umbrella body for sustainability initiatives in the Australian and New Zealand tertiary sectors. Its mission is to promote Environmentally Sustainable Development (ESD) by giving practitioners the resources, knowledge and developmental opportunities they need to green their campuses and ensure that education for sustainability is integrated into higher education.

This year’s conference theme focussed on “Carbon, Green Skilling and Water Conservation”, and attracted several fantastic keynote speakers from around the globe; Professor Tim Flannery, Professor Steven Schwartz, Ms Leith Sharp (Harvard University) and Adam Spencer.

Over three days, 30 Sep to 2 Oct 2009, a lively and packed program covered a lot of ground, ranging from practical, hands-on campus case studies, to skilling programs and all the way through to the lofty and evolving theory of Organisational Change Management for Sustainability.
Adam Spencer summed up three great reasons why tertiary and vocational education has a vital and leading role to play in our societies being able to address issues of carbon reduction and Green Skilling of workforces. He said tertiary campuses:

Changing the past is impossible; changing the future is everything but that.

So, the question still remains, HOW? How do we embed sustainability into the very core of tertiary education? One way is social change - social change is a product of a large number of people making small changes. The key is in understanding how humans process change, and then develop an irresistible context that fosters and enables the change we need.

However Organisational Change is what Leith Sharp sees as the next central focus. Sharp has worked with universities for the last ten years to achieve organizational change in the pursuit of environmental sustainability. If enough is known about the problem, and there are many great ideas, so why is it so hard for universities (and society) to become sustainable?

Sharp says “As we have been working to drive our colleges and universities towards campus sustainability, we have been discovering that our greatest opportunities for achieving the depth, breath and pace of change can only be realized by using a systems-thinking approach that addresses life cycle costs and impacts. We have started to reveal not only the environmental imperative for adopting systems thinking, but also the financial and political imperatives for doing so. It is now only a matter of time before we begin to see our colleges and universities transforming themselves into systems thinking institutions.”

The 2009 ACTS Conference certainly delved into the sustainability hotbed and it is heart-warming to see sustainability so firmly embedded in the future of tertiary education’s evolution. It seems there is still plenty to do in this space. Stay tuned for further developments.


Further reading:
Higher education: the quest for the sustainable campus

¹ Malcom X