Thomas Skou Grindsted

Sustainable Universities – From Declarations on Sustainability in Higher Education to National Law

Declarations on Sustainability in Higher Education (SHE) can be viewed as a piece of international regulation. Over the past 30 years research at universities has produced convincing data to warn about deterioration of the environment, resource scarcity and the need for sustainability. This in turn, has put a counter pressure on the university, forcing it to review its role as a driver for sustainable development. Today, universities and intergovernmental institutions have developed more than 31 SHE declarations, and more than 1400 universities have signed a SHE declaration globally. However, it is well known that signing a declaration does not necessarily lead to implementation. This is due to the lack of incentive structures. The article examines the discursive interaction between university and intergovernmental declarations that form the basis for the design of sustainable universities. Declarations tend to have impact on three trends. Firstly, there is emerging international consensus on the university’s role and function in relation to sustainable development; secondly, the emergence of national legislation, and thirdly, an emerging international competition to be leader in sustainable campus performance.

What Can Human Geography Offer Climate Change Modelling

The discipline of Geography may be one of the most prominent and oldest disciplines in the conceptualization of human–environment interactions that integrates elements from both natural and social sciences. Yet, much research on society–environment interactions on climate change reduces human behaviour to economic rationality when construed in sophisticated climate models and sometimes in non-geographical representations. The need to comprehensively take into consideration methodological approaches concerning the interface of society-environment interactions seems highly relevant to contemporary conceptual modelling of climate change adaption and mitigation. In other words, geographical representations do matter. In the following we will first reflect upon what I shall call spatio-temporal tides and waves of the human environment theme to examine the methodological grounds on which climate change models is based. From a history-geographical perspective the article shows that notions of objective models are increasingly challenged in an era of the anthropocene. It points toward a discussion of interdisciplinary challenges and the ways in which different traditions interpret and explain regularities, rationalities, and pre-analytic assumptions. Lastly we discuss challenges of constructing nature(s) and how we better understand the (geo) politics of climate change modeling.

The Matter of Geography in Education for Sustainable Development: The Case of Danish University Geography

Geographical imaginations are absolutely vital to make sense of sustainability challenges. Yet, a number of studies reveal that geography education has been slow in integrating issues of sustainability into curricula. Geography is particularly interesting in the context of ESD, due to its tradition of investigating human-environment interactions. In this paper we aim to contribute to this particular field of knowledge by providing an empirical analysis of ESD in Danish University Geography. In this paper it is examined how programs in Geography in higher education have taken different approaches to addressing issues of sustainability. Then, it is examined how geographers articulate their role and function as to addressing issues of sustainability. It is concluded that, though geographers generally are reluctant with using the concept of sustainability, and find it better serves as an implicit notion, geographers’ find their discipline contributes considerably to ESD in three ways. First, geography’s strong tradition in the human-environment theme provides a methodological basis for dealing with issues of sustainability. Second, the spatio-temporal dimensions of sustainability call for geographical approaches to be able to understand the dynamics, complexity and interactions in various scales. Third, geographers find their discipline provides an integrative knowledge platform between the natural and social sciences.