Sida 2012 ITP – ESD in Higher Education

From March 20 to May 4, Prof. Li Fengting, Vice Dean of UNEP—Tongji Institute of Environment for Sustainable Development (IESD), headed for Sweden with Ms. Yang Yanyun, to attended “Sustainability in Higher Education” 2012 International Training Class, which is funded by Sweden International Development Association (Sida), and organized by Niras Corporation of Sweden.

This one-year training program, which training class and program guide responded by Sweden Niras Corporation, IESD and South Africa Rhodes University, aims to complete a teaching reform project to promote sustainability education in higher education, by training participants as two weeks in Sweden and 2 weeks in Shanghai IESD (or Rhodes University) . All 32 participants are from 11 countries of both Asia and Africa.

During the training, the represents of IESD have visited Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden Uppsala University and Chalmers University of Technology. Through two weeks communication with scholars and managers in sustainability education area, they got a rough picture of the two universities’ basic information of sustainability education and sustainability school building. Afterwards, they discussed the possibility of future cooperation with Uppsala University and got an active respond, subsequently, they identified cooperation area and begun to protocol cooperative project application, prepared to apply to Sida for special cooperation project. The cooperation areas will include: cooperation in sustainability education program building, student exchange for the second degree on sustainability, current situation investigation of Chongming Island’s sustainability education, and compile the guide of sustainability university education class jointly.