Sustainability in education
EPFL Auditorium © EPFL Alain Herzog
The climate and sustainability challenges we face are urgent, and require universities like EPFL to make sustainability education a priority. To equip tomorrow’s scientists, engineers and architects with the skills they need to help build and serve a sustainable society, we offer a wide range of curricular and extra-curricular activities, as well as coaching and training programs – all oriented towards sustainability.
We want to give our graduates knowledge about sustainability and capacity to act within complex systems, in addition to their field-specific skills. To that end, a Teach4Sustainability working group was lunched in 2022 to propose concrete actions.
→ Read the news of March 27, 2023
This working group has been tasked with expanding and broadening our range of our sustainability classes in the coming years – a request we frequently received from our students. A new mandatory course on sustainability will be introduced in 2025 for all bachelor students. The pilot sarted in Spring 2024. In addition, all the study plans are mandated to include core-courses linking sustainability to field-specific challenges.
→ Read the news of September 4, 2024
We’re also developing training programs for our staff, and we will expand our sustainability-oriented outreach and continuing education initiatives.
By training members of our entire community on these issues, we hope to give them valuable skills they can apply in their careers.
Sustainability-oriented educational programs
We offer a growing number of sustainability-oriented classes that award European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) credits. We also run extra-curricular activities and other types of initiatives, projects and awards (see below).
To learn more about our student sustainability initiatives, visit our Community and Outreach web page.
Teaching sustainability
If our students are to become competent, responsible scientists and engineers, our faculty members must be trained on how to teach basic sustainability topics as well as more specialized classes. Since 2022, we’ve been providing training, personalized coaching and other resources to help faculty members incorporate sustainability into their classes.
Lifelong Learning
Our outreach and continuing education initiatives are intended to promote science and engineering, and to share recent developments in these fields that can be useful to our society and economy. We want to expand this range of programs in order to increase general understanding of sustainability issues, help policymakers make decisions that are evidence-based, update the skills of specialists in engineering and other fields, and raise youth awareness about sustainability through programs at schools and universities.
Specialist training for experts in the field
For more information on outreach programs
Contact
Melanie Studer
[email protected]
+41 21 693 40 96