Integrating health and sustainability: The higher education sector as a timely catalyst

Higher education is an influential sector with enormous potential to impact positively on health and sustainability. The purpose of this paper was to explore its emergent role as a key setting for promoting health and sustain-ability and for addressing their challenges in an integrated and coherent way. Acknowledging both the relative narrowness of the environmen-tal focus that has to date characterized and driven universities ’ work in relation to sustain-ability and the demonstrable value of adopting a whole-system approach, this paper will ex-plore the concept of ‘Healthy Universities ’ as a means of furthering debate and facilitating synergy between public health, sustainable de-velopment and climate change. Higher education represents one large-scale sector with a unique combination of roles that can be harnessed to focus and mobilize its edu-cation, knowledge exchange, research, corpo-rate responsibility and future shaping agendas to achieve significant impacts in this area. It is the growing commitment to embedding health and well-being within the mainstream business of higher education coupled with the expecta-tion that universities will act sustainably in all that they do that provides the perfect spring-board to influence a process of ‘co-ordinated action ’ to address climate change and impact positively on the integrated health and sustain-ability agenda