people and planet

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TABLE 0.1:
How education is typically linked with other Sustainable Development Goals
Goal 1 Education is critical to lifting people out of poverty. Goal 10 Where equally accessible, education makes a proven difference to social and economic inequality.
Goal 2
Education plays a key role in helping people move towards more sustainable farming
methods, and in understanding nutrition.
Education can make a critical difference to a range of health issues, including early mortality,
reproductive health, spread of disease, healthy lifestyles and well-being.
Goal 11
Education can give people the skills to participate in shaping and maintaining more
sustainable cities, and to achieve resilience in disaster situations.
Education can make a critical difference to production patterns (e.g. with regard to the
circular economy) and to consumer understanding of more sustainably produced goods and
prevention of waste.
Education is key to mass understanding of the impact of climate change and to adaptation
and mitigation, particularly at the local level.
Education is important in developing awareness of the marine environment and building
proactive consensus regarding wise and sustainable use.
Education and training increase skills and capacity to underpin sustainable livelihoods and to
conserve natural resources and biodiversity, particularly in threatened environments.
Social learning is vital to facilitate and ensure participative, inclusive and just societies, as well
as social coherence.
Lifelong learning builds capacity to understand and promote sustainable development policies
and practices.
Goal 3
Goal 12
Goal 5
Education for women and girls is particularly important to achieve basic literacy, improve
participative skills and abilities, and improve life chances.
Education and training increase skills and the capacity to use natural resources more
sustainably and can promote hygiene.
Educational programmes, particularly non-formal and informal, can promote better energy
conservation and uptake of renewable energy sources.
There is a direct link among such areas as economic vitality, entrepreneurship, job market
skills and levels of education.
Education is necessary to develop the skills required to build more resilient infrastructure and
more sustainable industrialization.
Goal 13
Goal 6
Goal 14
Goal 7
Goal 15
Goal 8
Goal 16
Goal 9
Goal 17
Source: ICSU and ISSC (2015).
educational
Increased educational
attainment helps
transform lives by
attainment helps transform
reducing poverty,
lives by reducing poverty, improving health
improving health outcomes, outcomes,
advancing
advancing technology and
technology
increasing social cohesion and increasing
social cohesion
(UNESCO, 2013,
2014b). It can also enable individuals to better cope with,
and reduce their vulnerability to, the dangers associated
with climate change.
Education is associated with increased environmental
awareness, concern and, in some contexts, action.
Across the 57 countries participating in the 2006
Programme for International Student Assessment
(PISA) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD), students who scored
higher in environmental science reported higher
awareness of complex environmental issues. The more
years of schooling, the more a person’s concern for
environmental protection increases, according to results
from the World Values Surveys. Educated citizens
with greater environmental awareness and concern
are more likely to get involved in political action to
protect the environment. Education also gives citizens
skills needed to adapt to the adverse effects of climate
change. Farmers in low income countries are especially
vulnerable to climate change. A survey in Burkina
Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Niger,
Senegal, South Africa and Zambia showed that farmers
with more education were more likely to build resilience
through adaptation.
The links go both ways. Children living in poverty are
more likely to have less education and less access to basic
services. Access to clean water and improved sanitation
is especially important for girls’ education. It influences
their education decisions and generates health gains,
time savings and privacy. Sustainable consumption
and production patterns, such as improvements to the
physical environment, green government regulations and
changes in consumer demand for greener products and
services, increase interest in education for sustainable
development. Tackling climate change is essential for
overall progress on the SDGs, including SDG 4. SDG
13 aims to promote urgent action to combat climate
change and its impact; sustainable development cannot
be achieved without this.
The reciprocal ties between education and many SDGs
have not been the focus of sustained research. A review
of 40 flagship evidence-based UN reports found relatively
weak coverage of links between education and SDGs
12 to 15, which address sustainable consumption and
production, climate change, oceans and marine resources,
and terrestrial ecosystems (Vladimirova and Le Blanc,
2015). Similarly, the evidence base on constraints and
challenges to synergies between SDGs tends to be
limited or non-existent. This clear gap in knowledge
must be addressed: not only the nexus of links between
development sectors, but also any unintended adverse
effects between them, should be better understood.
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INTRODUCTION | SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: A STRATEGY FOR PEOPLE, PLANET AND PROSPERITY