Environmental management system at higher education accentuates education for sustainable development

Introduction: Under Swedish law, the universities are required to implement environmental management systems (EMS) in their operations. The introductory EMS review emphasizes education for sustainable development (ESD) as the most significant environmental aspect. Contemporary education spends time on training in sustainability with established knowledge, hazards, risks and approaches for improvement of known issues through 'declarative knowledge', which is always a step behind developments, because it works with historical facts.Objectives:Consequently, a target has been set of equipping students with the knowledge, values, attitudes and competences that will help them deal with problems that arise in society in the future through the introduction of ESD into all of the university’s programs. The aspect of how we can assess whether graduate students possess these skills remains to be resolved before the annual EMS audit.Methods:The available methods for evaluation are surveys addressed to students, alumni and teachers in a prolonged time study. ESD extends and adapts contemporary 'declarative knowledge' to a teachers' toolkit of 'functioning knowledge' as an intrinsic part regardless of the field or the teaching topic.Results:We will develop ESD in the form of tools which can be easily recognized at higher education. The challenge is to broaden students' knowledge and comprehension of a core academic discipline to a level that has not been considered or introduced into education at our university or used in practice.Conclusion:Toolkits which can conveniently be used in ESD are discussed in the conclusions of this paper. The result in annual surveys reports the level of continuous improvement concerning EMS objectives and for teachers it confirms the achievement in planned progression and development of ESD in courses.