Giving EAUC Members a powerful international voice at the next Earth Summit

The role that tertiary education does, can and should play in sustainable development

The leadership of EAUC, Australasia Campuses Towards Sustainability (ACTS) and Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE - North America), Global University Network for Innovation (GUNI) and Korean Association for Green Campus Initiative (KAGCI)  collaborated to develop a mechanism for the worldwide tertiary education community to collectively inform the delegates of the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development Rio+20 (UNCSD). Our vision and views will be compiled and presented to Earth Summit delegates in Rio next June.

To this end, two documentsw were offered as a framework and stimulus to the discussion that will feed into the document.

The first document, Framework for Discussing the Role of Tertiary Education in Sustainable Development at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, is based on the UNCSD request for input to the Compilation document and uses that framework to solicit and collect input into a collection that will shape the document to be provided on behalf of the represented tertiary education community.

The second document, Why the Critical Role of Tertiary Education Institutions to Global Sustainable Development Must Be Central to the Rio+20 Discussion, is intended to stimulate discussion and critique regarding the role of tertiary education in sustainable development with the intent of producing a set of arguments to support that role. A statement of this sort will be needed to convince delegates that tertiary education should be included in the Earth Summit Outcomes document.

Your voice

For a two week period in October, we collected EAUC Members' views via a survey in order to put forward our collective vision and views.

The survey is now closed, thank you to everyone who submitted their views. The final EAUC response, aggregated with AASHE, ACTS, GUNi and KAGCI are published below.