The year 2015 ended with more than 16 000 homes being flooded in Scotland and Northern England, approximately 43 people died in the United States due to severe weather conditions, including floods in the southern states and tornadoes in Texas. As if this was not enough, more than a million Syrian migrants and refugees crossed into Europe to find protection and shelter and nearly three million Malawians struggled to find food and clean water and had to depend on WHO for vaccine due to cholera. The list is endless.
As Richard McLellan, the Director of Footprint at WWF International says,“ we have only one Earth and we are all connected in this single, living planet. It’ s our only home and it’ s in dire need of attention”. 1 Human impacts on Earth have been felt for a long time. According to The Living Planets Report, 2008, published by WWF, we are consuming the Earth ´ s natural resources at a tremendous speed. For example,“ Swedes today have an average ecological footprint of 5.9 global hectares and is ranked 13 in the list of countries with largest footprint per person. If all people on Earth were to live like Swedes, we would need 3 planets.” 2( Sustainable Schools, WWF)
There are many different definitions for sustainable development but the one that catches our attention most is,“ It is a way of thinking about how we organise our lives and work – including our education system – so that we don’ t destroy our most precious resource, the planet. Sustainable development means inspiring people in all parts of the world to find solutions that improve their quality of life without storing up problems for the future, or impacting unfairly on other people’ s lives. It must be more than recycling bottles or giving money to charity. It is about thinking and working in a profoundly different way or to put it another way: Enough for All, Forever”. 3
The concept of sustainable development became widely known in 1987 through the UN report, Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland report 4. The report emphasises that one can only solve sustainability issues by integrating ecological, social and economic dimensions, and thus get a sustainable society. In practice it is a great challenge to take into account these three dimensions simultaneously, and the International Institute for Sustainable Development describes the conflicts that may arise in their report from 2010:
1 http:// ensia. com / voices / we-only-have-one-earth-so-we-better-start-taking-care-of-it / retrieved 9 th Jan, 2016
2 www. wwf. se 3 From teachernet. org. uk / sustainableschools – no longer available on line
4 http:// www. un-documents. net / wced-ocf. htm
7