Universities and other higher education institutions have a critical role in helping society achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through their research, learning and teaching, campus operations and leadership. One of the most important ways they can contribute to this is to support students and other learners within their sphere to develop the necessary knowledge, skills and mindsets to contribute to solving the complex sustainable development challenges our world faces. 

Universities have been providing some aspects of Education for the SDGs to some of their students through their traditional learning and teaching activities. However, there is a need to both scale up existing activities, as well as implement and mainstream new types of transformative learning activities, which employ inter-disciplinarity, action-based learning, and multi-actor involvement, and which go beyond usual operations.