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Knowledge Systems for Sustainable Development

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    • Education must play a central role to meet the challenges of sustainable development.
      • The Millennium Development Goals place education, health and the environment at the centre of the challenges to be met by the international community - Koichïro MATSUURA

The Millennium Development Goals place education, health and the environment at the centre of the challenges to be met by the international community - Koichïro MATSUURA

Early in the 21st Century, the international community adopted the well-known "Millennium Development Goals" which should serve to guide the action of governments and major decision makers in the private sector. Some of these goals, and not the least important of them, are directly linked to education, environment and health issues.

The Education for All priority target is to give all children access to a complete cycle of primary education. It is based on the need for children to stay in school long enough to acquire effective essential learning and life-skills. Many studies have demonstrated that children's health and nutrition are important factors that condition their ability to learn and the quality of their education.

The second education goal aims to reduce gender disparity and make sure that girls and boys get equal access to primary and secondary education. On this point, the interaction between education, culture and health is extremely important in view of the influence of social customs and cultural prejudice in these mechanisms for emancipation.

On the subject of infant mortality, the Millennium Declaration aims to reduce by two thirds the mortality of children less than five years of age by 2015. To this end, improvements in health care and nutrition considerably reduce the risk of anaemia, and fighting lethal infection before and after birth require sufficient quantities of clean water.

Concerning major diseases, the Millennium Declaration states as an objective by 2015, to halt the progression of AIDS and other major pandemics, and to begin to reverse the present trend. General improvements in health care and nutrition help to fight these diseases. The risk of water-related diseases can be reduced by improvements to water management and educational programmes.

The Millennium Declaration also emphasises the need to protect our common environment in the context of sustainable economic development. Major objectives are to cease intensive exploitation of natural resources and to reduce by half the number of people who still have no access to safe drinking water or adequate health care systems. The Declaration attaches importance to the need for a reduction to a minimum of the emission of greenhouse gases; it points out efforts required to improve the management, conservation and development of forests on a sustainable basis. It also calls for a termination of intensive exploitation of water resources, and for the development of national and local strategies to ensure equitable access to water, to combat pollution and guarantee the protection of the quality of water. Good water management is a decisive factor for safeguarding ecosystem integrity.

The Declaration also underlines the need to protect biodiversity and measures to be taken to combat drought and desertification.

On a more general level, all development objectives include one common aim which is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. In many parts of the world, poverty is defined by a combination of hunger, faulty health care systems, unfavourable environmental conditions, and inadequate and ineffective educational systems.

It's important to recognize that the World Education Forum (Dakar, Senegal April 2000) went further than the two education-related goals in the Millennium Declaration by establishing four additional goals: early childhood care and education, quality of education, adult literacy and equitable access to appropriate learning and life-skills programmes for all young people and adults.

Meanwhile the United Nations General Assembly has also proclaimed three recent initiatives, involving programme "Decades" on these subjects:

  • The United Nations Literacy Decade (2003-2012)
  • The United Nations Decade for Sustainable Development (2005-2014)
  • The United Nations Decade for Action'Water for Life', beginning on World Water Day 22nd March, 2005 (ending 22nd March 2015).

UNESCO is playing or will play a key role in each of these UN Decades

Bridging the disciplinary divide:
Since the boundaries between various scientific disciplines are more and more sharply defined, reaching a common understanding is increasingly difficult. UNESCO plays a useful role by promoting dialogue among disciplines so that viable solutions to multi-faceted problems can be found. Such dialogue helps to dispel possible misunderstandings and bridge the disciplinary divide.

Improving the level of public debate about education, environment and health:
Research institutes, non-governmental organizations and civil society all have responsibilities to ensure that democratic debate is grounded upon cogent argumentation and reliable evidence. To ensure that dialogue among disciplines and informed democratic debate rest on strong foundations, quality education for all throughout the life-span is essential.