ABSTRACT
The ‘United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development’ came into existence on 1 January 2005. UN Resolution 57/254, proposing the decade, was tabled by Japan at the 57th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in December 2002. The resolution itself is the culmination of a long and winding journey through high level international commissions that can ultimately be traced back more than quarter of a century to the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in June 1972. Considerable momentum was generated during the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero with consensus intensifying after the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development at Johannesburg. UNESCO is the designated lead agency for the promotion of the Decade. Education for Sustainable Development is centred around an assumption that humanity must dramatically shift its present course of development to ensure a healthy, just and secure world for future generations. As such its focus is on a combination of environmental, social and economic development, though much of the dialogue about the initiative, including this book, has been largely from the environmental education sector. In the words of the Draft Implementation Scheme: “Education for Sustainable Development has come to be seen as a process of learning how to make decisions that consider the long-term future of the economy, ecology and equity of all communities. Building the capacity for such futures-orientated thinking is a key task of education” (UNESCO, 2003).
