Education for SDGs: Commitment to Meaningful Education

The University of Newcastle has a clear and institution-wide commitment to meaningful education around the Sustainable Development Goals, ensuring relevance and applicability to all students.

We are dedicated to ensuring that every student graduating from the University of Newcastle has meaningful exposure to sustainability principles and the SDGs through their degree. This commitment is embedded in our Environmental Sustainability Plan, which is regularly updated and publicly available.

To achieve this, we integrate sustainability concepts, practices, and competencies across the curriculum in a way that is relevant to each discipline. This ensures that students engage with sustainability not only as a theoretical concept but as a practical and applicable framework within their chosen field of study. Our institutional commitment is reflected in our guiding principle that “environmental sustainability is embedded across the highest levels of the University.”

As part of this initiative, we offer a CIFAL-certified sustainability training modules online, accessible to all students. These modules support the development of core sustainability competencies and complement discipline-specific learning.

---

Importantly, the CIFAL-certified courses are also available to the broader community, including alumni, local residents, displaced people, schools, and children, demonstrating our commitment to inclusive and lifelong sustainability education. Throughout all of 2024, we offered educational activities for the wider community, which included alumni, local residents, displaced people, schools and children. They are certified by CIFAL Newcastle and UNITAR and continue into 2025.

We also provide practical tools to help students and the community understand the connection between individual courses and the SDGs. All University of Newcastle courses have been mapped to the relevant SDGs, which are clearly displayed on each course listing. Students can search by SDG to design a program that aligns with their sustainability interests and provides a comprehensive overview of how their studies contribute to global goals.

---

Research

View more