What are sustainability competencies?
Building sustainability competencies helps your students translate knowledge into real-world action (Oanh, 2018). These are not just about understanding environmental issues but about developing the thinking skills, practical abilities, and values that prepare students to tackle complex challenges throughout their careers. Two major frameworks - UNESCO Education for Sustainable Development framework (UNESCO, 2017) and GreenComp (Bianchi et al., 2022) - offer some useful approaches to inform student competencies through your teaching.
The UNESCO framework (2017) organises competencies into three practical categories, further developed by Advance HE/QAA (2021) to support UK higher education:
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Ways of Thinking acts on students’ cognitive abilities. This includes helping students see how different parts of complex systems connect (systems thinking), imagine and evaluate different possible futures (futures thinking), and question assumptions while reflecting on their own perspectives (critical thinking).
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Ways of Practising focuses on turning ideas into action. Students learn to design strategies that work in real contexts (strategic action), bring together different perspectives and disciplines (collaboration), and tackle multifaceted challenges by integrating different approaches (problem-solving).
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Ways of Being addresses values, identity, and responsibility. Students develop awareness of their own motivations and role in society (self-awareness) while learning to navigate competing values and understand principles like justice, equity, and inclusion.
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Impact
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Competencies
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Descriptor
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Ways of thinking
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Systems thinking
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Recognize connections across complex issues, analyse how different domains interact, work with uncertainty
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Futures/Anticipatory thinking
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Envision multiple possible futures, apply precautionary approaches, assess consequences of actions
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Critical thinking
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Question established practices, reflect on their own values and actions, engage constructively with sustainability debates
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Ways of practising
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Strategic action
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Design and implement innovative solutions that work in real contexts, from local to global scales
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Collaboration
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Learn from diverse perspectives, practice empathy, facilitate group problem-solving across differences
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Integrated problem-solving
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Apply multiple competencies together to develop inclusive, equitable solutions to sustainability challenges
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Ways of being
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Self-awareness
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Understand their role in society, evaluate their motivations, manage emotions and aspirations constructively
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Normative understanding
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Reflect on the values underlying their decisions, navigate conflicts between different priorities and stakeholder interests
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The GreenComp framework also offers a complementary framework with 12 competencies organized into four thematic areas, designed specifically to empower learners as agents of change (Bianchi et al., 2022). In particular, the GreenComp’s framework builds on UNESCO's competencies by explicitly foregrounding political agency and collective action, defining sustainability competence as 'empowering learners to embody sustainability values, embrace complex systems, and take or request action that restores and maintains ecosystem health and enhances justice’ (Bianchi et al., 2022).
GreenComp thematic areas and competencies are:
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Embodying sustainability values: Valuing sustainability, supporting fairness, and promoting nature - emphasizing that humans are part of nature and depend on planetary health.
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Embracing complexity in sustainability: Systems thinking, critical thinking, and problem framing - helping students navigate wicked problems.
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Envisioning sustainable futures: Futures literacy, adaptability, and exploratory thinking - encouraging imagination and creativity in designing alternative futures.
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Acting for sustainability: Political agency, collective action, and individual initiative - empowering students to drive change.
Where to start
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Designing a new course? Consider which 2-3 competencies align best with your discipline and build assessments around them.
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Revising an existing module? Look for opportunities where you are already developing these competencies - you may just need to make them more explicit.
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Working on programme-level outcomes? The three categories from the UNESCO’s framework (Thinking, Practising, Being) offer a useful structure for mapping competencies across multiple modules.
QAA and AdvanceHE – Education for Sustainable Development Guidance
Section 3 from Advance HE: Education for Sustainable Development Guidance provides a detailed, practical overview of teaching, learning and assessment approaches for EfS that are ready to be implemented. It introduces the key competencies for sustainability, course and module learning outcomes for EfS and guidance about developing learning environments to support EfS. In particular, it provides practical examples alongside useful tables that align EfS learning outcomes with key EfS competencies (Table 2 pp. 36-38), as well as teaching practices to develop these competencies (Table 3). Check it out here.