Different societies and cultures see the world in different ways and have different agendas and priorities. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) seeks to place learning for sustainability in the context of people’s life experience.

This cultural aspect is central to ESD, looking at underlying assumptions about things central to sustainability, like wealth and poverty, our right to consume, our relation to the planet and its minerals, and to the plant and animal kingdoms.

These attitudes are shaped by the moral codes we inherit from our family and close community and learn from school, neighbourhood, religion and national culture, and we need to be aware that when we consider issues relating to sustainability we are looking through a lens which can distort what we see.

Another common distortion is that created by our faculty for simplifying issues. It works extremely well in many cases, but the essence of sustainability is to consider how things fit into a wider context, by thinking systemically.

The aim of our ESD programme is to make sense of complex issues and to put them into context, providing tools, analysis and commentary, giving evidence and helping people to make their own conclusions.