ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the urgent challenges and diverse role expectations surrounding the sustainability agenda that engage universities. It explains several wicked problems that confront and engage university actors concerned with sustainable development. Sustainable development encompasses a wide range of activity, including a multiplicity of efforts aimed at enhancing human health and wellbeing and reducing economic disparities and multiple steps designed to forestall environmental degradation and promote ecological health. Climate change is linked with virtually all sectors and areas of human activity with potential seriously to impede sustainable development. Understanding the basic nature of sustainable-development processes and challenges is a prerequisite for conducting useful outcome and impact evaluations. Sustainable development rests in important ways on the maintenance of cultural and biological diversity. Biodiversity loss threatens a broad range of ecosystem services and frustrates sustainable-development efforts. Deforestation affects the global environment in multiple ways. Forest loss also is critical for climate change because forests act as major sinks of atmospheric carbon.
