Universities must lead the way in addressing the SDGs

2021 feels like a watershed moment for the world in our efforts to create a more sustainable and equitable future for everyone. Both the coronavirus pandemic and Climate Emergency are truly global challenges, with both disproportionately affecting the poorest and most marginalised people in society.

Our sector is well-placed to provide leadership in the world’s efforts to address these challenges. This was demonstrated throughout the coronavirus pandemic, during which universities such as UCL provided advice to governments and spearheaded the development of life-saving treatments and vaccines.

It is incumbent upon us to do the same to address the numerous challenges framed within the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), from minimising climate change and decreases in biodiversity, to reducing social inequalities and ensuring a good education for all the world’s children.

Addressing the challenges facing society was at the heart of UCL’s founding mission in 1826, and we continue to bring together the brightest minds across different disciplines to tackle the pressing issues of the 21st century.

When I joined UCL in January 2021, I was pleased to find thousands of our staff and students addressing the SDGs through their research, teaching and extra-curricular activities. We established the UCL SDGs Initiative (SDGI) to stimulate and facilitate many more, and to help ensure our collective efforts is greater than the sum of our parts.

Over the past five years, UCL published around 30,000 SDGs-related research papers, many of them with partners around the world. They addressed diverse topics, from improving sanitation in urban Africa to generating electricity from food waste in a London community garden next door to our central London campus.

However, we wanted to ensure the UCL SDGI maximises not just the impact of our research on the SDGs. It also encompasses our teaching, external engagement, student activity and operations, as well as new opportunities for collaboration, including between these different spheres of our activity.

To help to ensure this, we established a university-wide SDGs Board to provide strategic direction, while also encouraging a ‘bottom-up’ approach from across our faculties and student union to generate grassroots input.

We are looking at ways to incorporate sustainability into teaching across our faculties to educate the next generation of policymakers, academic researchers, entrepreneurs or social campaigners. After all, it is they, not us, who will go on to address the challenges facing the world long after 2030.

Students studying English at UCL are already examining how literature is representing global climate changes, while those studying physics are learning about how humans can deal with climate change, as well as the science of global warming. Our aim is for all our students to have the opportunity to study and be involved in sustainability.

Our students are some of our most vocal proponents of achieving the SDGs. To harness this spirit, we are empowering them to get involved in extra-curricular activities that are supporting the SDGs. Notable examples include redistributing surplus meals to tackle food poverty in London and organising workshops to help London schoolchildren better understand the climate emergency.

Beyond our education and research, we are also thinking hard how our own operations could better further the SDGs. We’ve set challenging targets for the way we operate as a university: by 2024 our aim is for our campus to be free of single-use plastic, for our buildings to be net zero carbon and to have created 10,000 square metres of more biodiverse space on campus.

Working in partnership

However, we are acutely aware that we cannot address global problems and deliver true impact on our own.

We can only achieve this, firstly by listening to others who may know more than us, and, more broadly, by providing opportunities for more and deeper local and global partnerships – with other universities, governments, policymakers, industries and local communities.

The challenges are complex, interconnected and will require working in partnership to develop multi-organisation and cross-disciplinary solutions.

With their history of discovery through collaboration and the increasing awareness of the need to engage externally to ensure these discoveries have real-world impact, universities are uniquely placed to spearhead these partnerships: within our own institutions, with each other, and with governments, local communities and industry.

For example, teams at UCL are using ‘citizen scientists’ in the UK to gauge the public's appetite for composting biodegradable plastics, and are working with clinicians, manufacturers and wheelchair users in Kenya to develop bespoke wheelchairs using 3D printing.

Beyond UCL, we are also continuing to play a leading role in global bodies, including the UN and U7+ Alliance. Whether they are research collaborations or sharing our expertise with global bodies, it is through such partnerships that we can address the SDGs.

The SDGs truly offer us a common language and framework that can unite academia, students, government and industry to deliver lasting change for people and planet. Let’s keep working together to achieve this.

Links

• This article first appeared in the International Association of Universities’ (IAU’s) Horizons magazine (vol. 26.2)