Developing sustainability awareness in higher education

Sustainable development is, currently, a major concern by most of the world’s nations. Since the report Our Future, by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987, the pattern of resources usage has been driven by the concern of meeting the “needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. This definition established the basis for the holistic and joint preservation of the natural world, considering economic, social and environmental factors. According to the United Nations, education is fundamental for achieving sustainable development. Beyond education for environment protection, the consumers’ and the producers’ attitudes has to change towards social awareness in a long term. Higher education institutions have the responsibility, and even gain from it, to implement projects and practices that foster sustainable development as well as contribute to the development of sustainability thinking among their students. The development of these competences should also be part of the curriculum of higher education degrees, which describe the training intentionality in the curricular unit forms. These are rigorously focused around the scientific area of the program, but they also include transversal skills, that contribute to empower the student with a broader set of knowledge and abilities. This study analyses three dimensions of sustainability: the teaching curricula, the scientific production and the policies and attitudes regarding the infrastructures. The first, because of their large quantity, are analyzed through the textual content of the curricular unit forms, using text mining tools and techniques, to get an overall idea of the intentional development of sustainability thinking in a higher education institution. The second uses the same approach to assess the areas and orientation of the scientific production, available in the institutional repository. Finally, the infrastructures component, which includes energy efficiency and waste management, is analyzed through the assessment of the policies and projects implemented in this area. Although there are sustainability concerns in the institution, mainly associated to the scientific and specific component of each area, there is no holistic and transversal strategy, with a balance between the economic, social and environmental spheres of sustainability. There are still challenges that higher education institutions must face, to stimulate the sustainability awareness among their students.