What do our students know about the future challenges of sustainability

There is no doubt that sustainable development (SD) education is crucial for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and we believe that engineering students are important actors for developing SD actions. However, we have few information about how engineering students think about SD issues. The papers aims to investigate engineering students’ sustainability awareness in the prism of the SDG. This is a key point in order to design well suited multi- or transdisiplinary curriculum in engineering education so as to develop their awareness of the key role they have to play. We applied an online quantitative survey to French engineering students at first year master level just before starting their specific courses in SD and entrepreneurship. This survey covered different dimensions: SD awareness, SD perception and actions towards SD. Our primary findings show that engineering students mostly associate SD to environmental end economic aspects related to technology (e.g.: renewable energy, low energy consumption, recycling or zero waste) and pay less attention to social aspects like social responsibility and partnership. They consider SD is very important at the global and national level but less important in their professional or personal life. They are reluctant to integrate SD actions in their everyday practice mainly because of lack of convenience or financial constraints.There is thus a room for raising their awareness about the central role of engineering in SDGs achievement and their understanding about the social impact of engineering. It would also worth putting more emphasis on social responsibility in their engineering curriculum.