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Embedding sustainability into your teaching and learning
This toolkit aims to support staff from all faculties and disciplines to develop educational experiences that empower and enable UCL students to become leaders and activators in the global transition.
9 September 2025
First published 28 April 2023, this toolkit was updated 9 September 2025.
What is Educational Sustainable Development (ESD)?
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is an approach to teaching and learning which empowers learners to understand and help address the challenges of sustainability and climate change. UNESCO, a leader in international ESD efforts, defines it as:
"the process of equipping students with the knowledge and understanding, skills and attributes needed to work and live in a way that safeguards environmental, social and economic wellbeing, in the present and for future generations" (UNESCO 2025).
This understanding requires educators to consider not just what their learners need to know about sustainability and climate change (curriculum content), but also the ways in which their teaching approaches (pedagogy) can support critical engagement with a range of complex and challenging issues such as climate justice and global inequality.
However, there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to ESD. Just like the idea of sustainability itself, ESD is an evolving field, and context is very important – so what it looks like in practice will depend on particular institutional and local contexts, disciplinary knowledge and requirements, and the diverse perspectives of educators and students themselves. This Toolkit is therefore intended as a set of ideas and resources for you to consider, try out, and amend to fit your own teaching context and practice as well as the needs of your students.
Why does ESD matter?
It is vital to equip students with the knowledge, skills and values that they need to thrive in a rapidly changing – and often uncertain – world. The specific knowledge, skills and values that they might need will depend on their discipline and future plans (those studying to be teachers, for instance, will have different needs to those studying engineering), but all students will need to engage with these ideas in some way.
Beyond the obvious drivers for and impacts of the climate crisis lies a whole host of wider social, economic and environmental sustainability challenges that require urgent attention. Climate injustice, biodiversity loss, changing skills needs, and rapid social and environmental change are just a few of the issues that our graduates will face immediately on leaving education. It is no wonder that an international survey of 10,000 young people aged 16-25 revealed that 84% are moderately worried by climate change. Nearly a half of all respondents reported feelings such as anxiety, anger, or helplessness that mar their experience on a daily basis (Hickman et al 2021).
There is a growing drive in higher education (HE) institutions globally to turn this trend around by embedding ESD in curricula and providing a more hopeful, transformative style of education that leaves students with a strong sense of agency and hope for the future (Bourn, 2021). UCL is already engaged in a range of initiatives to embed ESD in all our educational programmes and activities – both curricular and extra-curricular. This includes UCL’s commitment that by 2034 all students will be provided with an education that develops skills, competencies and knowledge to effectively engage with sustainability issues in their personal lives, communities and future career.
As UNESCO’s Berlin Declaration (2022) also notes:
“Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), anchored in SDG 4.7 and as an enabler for all 17 SDGs, is the foundation for the required transformation, providing everyone with the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to become change agents for sustainable development.”
At a national level in the UK, there is also increasing uptake of ESD in criteria used by chartering and accreditation bodies (e.g. The Law Society, Engineering Council, General Medical Council), so many students will need to engage with this as part of their professional development. As of June 2024, the UK Quality Code for Higher Education explicitly refers to sustainability as a key component of quality education provision across the sector (QAA 2024; see also QAA and Advance HE 2021).
The latest version of the UK Professional Standards Framework also now shows clear alignment between ESD and core Professional Values for HE educators (Advance HE 2023). This makes engaging with sustainability increasingly important for all HE professionals too.
How can I embed ESD in my teaching?
The following sections are a step-by-step process which is designed to help you identify ways to integrate ESD into your teaching. These steps are useful whether you are just starting to think about embedding ESD or you have already started the process and would like to develop your practice further. A range of further resources are also signposted that can support you along the way.
- Step 1. Reflect on your current teaching practice
- Step 2. Consider which topics, issues or themes are most relevant to your students
- Step 3. Adopt pedagogical approaches that encourage active engagement and critical exploration
- Step 4: Consider how assessment can support your students’ learning and engagement with sustainability and climate change
- Step 5: Make a plan and identify supportive networks
Step 1. Reflect on your current teaching practice
One of the best ways to start thinking through how you can embed ESD in your practice is to consider whether and how you already address key knowledge, skills and values within your current teaching. Indeed, many educators are doing this without realising it!
Keep in mind that sustainability is not just about including new curriculum content. It is crosscutting in the same way as other educational themes within higher education such as employability, global citizenship, decolonising the curriculum and EDI. It therefore requires a consideration of knowledge and skills as well as teaching approaches which encourage students to engage critically with complex topics and concerns.
When reflecting on your own teaching practice, key questions to consider therefore include:
Which topics or themes related to sustainability and climate change do you already include within your teaching, if any? (This might include a range of things related to the economic, social or environmental dimensions of sustainability, including topics such as climate change, biodiversity, international trade, ethics and the SDGs, or themes such as interconnectedness and cultural diversity, among many others.)
How do the teaching approaches you use support students to engage critically with key topics and themes? (This might be related directly to sustainability or more broadly to relevant disciplinary knowledge.) In what ways?
How does your teaching support students to develop the skills and competencies to address complex global issues in their future professional and/ or personal lives? (This might include a range of ‘life’ skills such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration, research, systems thinking, reflection and analysis, as well as more practical skills related to a specific subject area or discipline – e.g. sustainable design, transport, systems of production, policy analysis, etc.)
How do you encourage students to respectfully engage with a diverse range of ideas, values and perspectives within their discipline and/ or within their local, national or international communities? (Again, these might be related either to sustainability or to discipline-specific topics.) Do you ask them to reflect on related ideas such as cultural diversity, social justice, fairness or compassion as part of that learning?
How can your students take their learning forward in concrete or practical ways? Do you actively encourage them to do this? In what ways? (This might include considering taking part in activities in the campus or community or thinking about how they can apply their learning about sustainability and climate change to their future professional practice.)
The answers to these questions will vary a great deal based on your own expertise and disciplinary area, so again there is no single ‘one size fits all’ prescription. Rather, it’s about taking some time to reflect on (i) what your students need to know and experience during their studies and (ii) how your teaching can encourage them to actively engage with sustainability as part of their professional and personal development.
Once you have taken some time to reflect, and perhaps identified aspects that you would like to develop further in your teaching practice, you can move on to the following steps – which guide you to think in more detail about how to do this.
Step 2. Consider which topics, issues or themes are most relevant to your students
If you are new to ESD, including it within teaching content can often be a relatively easy way to get started. While some subject areas (e.g. natural sciences) might seem to lend themselves to ESD more readily than others, there are potential links across all subject areas and disciplines.
| Geography | Ask students to consider the causes and implications of climate change in diverse contexts; explore approaches to sustainability within diverse communities (e.g. indigenous approaches to agriculture or land management) |
|---|---|
| Art or design | Make creative projects from recycled or sustainable materials; explore the 'life cycle' of creative products and their impacts on sustainability (e.g. from the production of source materials to disposal at the end of a show/ installation) |
| Mathematics or Statistics | Ask students to work with global datasets or perform calculations and statistics related to sustainability issues (e.g. population growth, changes to sea levels, etc.) |
| Business or Economics | Explore alternative business models such as Fair Trade and B Corporations and consider the differences/ similarities to more mainstream models; investigate green jobs and sustainable business initiatives |
| Health | Explore the health impacts of climate change or of global public health trends such as migration; consider diverse cultural understandings of good health from across the world, including alternative or indigenous health systems |
| Religious studies | Explore different systems of belief and their perspectives on nature and the environment; discuss the global movement of faith communities (current or historical) and implications for diversity and equality |
| Languages | Use sustainability as a topic for conversational practice or teach vocabulary around a sustainability theme; facilitate an online exchange with students in another country to share language learning and develop understandings of cultural and social diversity |
| History | Add an environmental history dimension to teaching of key historic events; explore the historic roots of current global challenges and their relevance to sustainabilty (e.g. the Industrial Revolution in Europe; the development of global dependence on fossil fuels; colonisation) |
If you are unsure where to start, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can also offer inspiration for new directions and activities. You might like to try is reading through the 17 SDGs in full on UNESCO's website and then asking yourself which of the them you can address most naturally in your teaching. Given the broad scope of the SDGs, you are likely to find topics in your discipline that easily intersect with the concerns of sustainability. For example, a literary studies module that includes 19th-century English texts could raise opportunities for reflection and learning around SDG topics relating to histories of inequality, gender equality, industrialisation, water and sanitation, to name a few. (See also UNESCO’s (2017: 12-45) helpful guidance on using the SDGs to create specific learning objectives.)
In practical terms, a first step to embedding sustainability topics within your teaching might mean:
introducing a new teaching activity to your module (e.g. create a short presentation on an aspect of sustainability relevant to your discipline and ask your students to reflect on how they think it will affect their future professional lives)
providing new resources for students (e.g. add items on sustainability or climate change to reading lists or provide links to relevant online sources of information for them to explore and discuss)
reframing something you already teach to include a sustainability ‘lens’ (e.g. the examples above which ask art students to consider the sustainability impacts of their creative projects or including an environmental history dimension to teaching of key historical events)
Over time, you might then wish to extend your inclusion of sustainability in your teaching further by making more extensive revisions to modules or even to a whole programme (see Step 5 below for more on this). Keep in mind that this is a developmental journey, so it can take some time. It’s perfectly OK to start small and then make more progress when it feels right to you.
Step 3. Adopt pedagogical approaches that encourage active engagement and critical exploration
To embed ESD in their practice, educators in the HE sector are challenged with supporting the development not just of students’ knowledge, but also the development of skills and critical exploration of ideas and values. A key question is therefore how best to do this through approaches to teaching and learning (pedagogy).
Research and theory in ESD emphasises that a range of pedagogical approaches are needed in order to support high quality learning related to sustainability and climate change (see further readings below from Sterling, Scott & Vare, and Rieckmann, among others). While some approaches to teaching – such as lecturing – are great for efficiently sharing content knowledge and ideas with students, others – such as more active and participatory approaches – provide better opportunities for students to engage critically with key ideas, to develop important skills and to consider diverse perspectives. Providing a mixture of these approaches can open space for students to learn, reflect on and critically evaluate their own ideas and positions as well as that of others. It also enables them to develop key skills – such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration, research, systems thinking, reflection and analysis – to engage with a range of diverse perspectives, and to discover and develop their own orientations.
While the development of skills and competencies is widely regarded as central to teaching and learning in HE, however, the inclusion of values is sometimes highlighted as a more problematic area. This is because teaching about or discussing values can sometimes be seen to come too close to an endorsement or argument for a particular value set. However, the core aims of ESD teaching and learning approaches are in fact quite the opposite: rather than offering a prescriptive set of values, ideas or solutions to global issues and concerns, ESD instead explicitly uses active and experiential learning to enhance student learning, engagement and criticality. These approaches move away from the educator being the sole transmitter of knowledge and allow students to contribute to the co-construction of knowledge – to become active agents of their own learning and decision-making.
Active and experiential approaches also support a range of other areas of UCL’s work with students, including supporting skills development related to the Pillars of Employability and engaging with more diverse perspectives as part of efforts to decolonise teaching and research (see the UCL Grand Challenge of Cultural Understanding).
Examples of active and experiential pedagogical tools include:
- problem-based learning
- group work projects
- case studies
- reflection or reflective dialogue
- debates
- role play and simulations
- scenario planning
- imaginative reflection
Another element to consider related to teaching and learning is incorporating activities that get students out of the classroom and into dynamic learning environments either on campus or in the wider community. Hands-on projects like Living Labs, visits or volunteering with community groups can generate new ideas and engage students with diverse perspectives on sustainability or other global and local issues. Even taking simple steps like holding classes outside (weather allowing) can help students to link their conceptual learning to ‘real world’ applications and encourage them to consider the importance of time in nature to their health and well-being (see further readings from Singleton and Sipos et al). Given growing evidence of the emotional implications of climate change for young people (Hickman et al 2021), learning in natural spaces and with an emphasis on creative problem solving can also act as a powerful counter to climate anxiety and feelings of hopelessness (see UCL’s Wild Bloomsbury initiative, for example).
Step 4: Consider how assessment can support your students’ learning and engagement with sustainability and climate change
Assessment is an important extension to learning, particularly when it is well-matched with pedagogical tools. For example, a project-based learning module might include assessments based on similar professional projects, such as project proposals, project management plans, budgets, sustainability reports, presentations, etc. These can also be complemented with opportunities for student reflection. Group work projects or scenario-based activities, for instance, can be assessed with both an exam (to test curriculum knowledge) and a written blog or project diary (to support reflection and critical analysis). Asking students to create a policy or framework for action based on their learning about a topic can also provide ample opportunity for reflection, critical thinking and application of learning to everyday situations.
Including a variety of methods of assessment within modules and programmes also helps to address UCL’s work on the Programme Excellence Project and Curriculum Design Principles, which aim to provide high quality learning for all UCL students.
Step 5: Make a plan and identify supportive networks
Once you’ve had a chance to consider the curriculum content, teaching approaches and assessment that could help you to embed ESD within your teaching practice, the next step is to make a plan for taking this forward. This might include one or more of the following:
Short term – adding new small units of work or resources to module reading lists or reframing an existing activity to include a sustainability ‘lens’
Medium term – making more significant changes to existing modules (e.g. in terms of learning objectives, student activities and/ or assessments) or creating new modules with a sustainability focus
Longer term – redesigning a programme for validation, creating a new programme that prioritises teaching and learning about sustainability and climate change from a specific disciplinary perspective, or working with UCL colleagues to develop a new interdisciplinary programmes or initiative.
As before, whether you are working with a single activity, an assessment, a module or a whole programme, remember that changes to teaching practice can take time, so you may want to start small and then expand as you gain confidence.
Engaging with existing networks at UCL and beyond is also important for individual educators who are navigating changes to their teaching and learning practice, so as part of your planning consider who you might call upon to support you. At UCL, this might mean collaborating with others in your team or department, making new connections with staff in other disciplines or departments to co-develop interdisciplinary initiatives or reaching out to student groups or societies. A wide range of sustainability and climate change initiatives are led by both Sustainable UCL and the Students’ Union, for instance. You might also consider joining the UCL ESD Network to connect with colleagues and find out about new events and initiatives by staff and students.
Keep in mind that ESD is not just about what happens in the work of individual educators, it is a collaborative effort by many actors across the whole institution. A useful metaphor for this comes from McCowan (2021), who describes an approach to ESD in HE that addresses learning across three Cs: Curriculum, Campus and Community:
- Curriculum: ESD in the formal curriculum
The activities and resources suggested above are a starting point for developing approaches to integrating ESD into the formal curriculum.
- Campus: ESD by modelling
It is important that universities themselves promote and practise sustainability in their own operations and external engagements. Such efforts at ‘greening campus operations’ can be signposted for students in different ways. The aim is that they experience sustainable living and working in the immediate environment around them on a daily basis.
- Community: ESD outside the formal curriculum
Opportunities exist both for the provision of elective and non-credit bearing courses on sustainability and aspects of it, but there is also the chance for facilitating and/or signposting extracurricular opportunities for engagement with sustainability projects.
This institution-wide approach to learning around sustainability and climate change asks us as an institution to not only consider curriculum content and teaching and learning approaches in the classroom, but also to curate a range of relevant opportunities on campus and in the community. This kind of holistic approach provides a rich texture of education, learning and experiences to help students develop their ideas, understandings, skills and values for a more sustainable future.
Further help
If you are interested in developing your understanding and practice of ESD further, consider enrolling in the free online Educating for Sustainable Development in Schools and Universities short course, which was developed by UCL academics Dr Nicole Blum and Dr Frances Hunt (IOE – UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society). It takes about just a few hours to complete and is flexibly designed to allow you to consider your own practice in your own time. The course also gives you a chance to engage with diverse educators around the world who are exploring and developing their own practice in this area.
You can also find more information about work that UCL is doing related to ESD, sustainable development and climate change via the following links:
- UCL ESD Network
- Sustainable UCL Education pages
- UCL Students’ Union Sustainability Hub
- UCL Sustainable Development Goals Initiative
- UCL Teaching Toolkit: Challenge-led education with UCL Grand Challenges
- UCL Teaching Toolkit: A Whole Curriculum Approach to Addressing the Climate Crisis
- References and Further Resources
Advance HE (2023) Framework for Education for Sustainable Development. [See also a range of other helpful resources for educators on this website.]
EAUC (2025) Showing the Path to Green Jobs - a guide for careers and student support staff in FHE.
Leicht, A., Heiss, J., and Byun, W. J. (2018) Issues and trends in Education for Sustainable Development. Paris: UNESCO. [A valuable guide to thinking in the field with contributions from experts from around the world.]
QAA (2024) UK Quality Code for Higher Education.
QAA and Advance HE (2021) Education for Sustainable Development Guidance.
Sterling, S. (2011) The Future Fit Framework: An introductory guide to teaching and learning for sustainability in HE. Higher Education Academy. [A well-regarded guide which provides a range of ideas and guidance for professional and institutional change.]
UNESCO (2025) Glossary. Montreal: UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
UNESCO (2022) Berlin Declaration on Education for Sustainable Development. Paris: UNESCO.
UNESCO (2020) Education for Sustainable Development: A Roadmap. Paris: UNESCO.
UNESCO (2017) Education for Sustainable Development Goals: Learning Objectives
This guide has been revised and updated in 2025 by Nicole Blum, Associate Professor (UCL IoE) with support from Sustainable UCL and colleagues in the Development Education Research Centre (UCL IOE). The original Toolkit was produced in 2023 by Kate Roach, Associate Professor (Education) and then-Chair of the ESD Working Group.
You are welcome to use this guide if you are from another educational facility, but you must credit the project.
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