The EELISA association held a workshop entitled ” Teaching sustainable development: from a disciplinary to a learning outcome approach ” on 28 June at the École des Ponts ParisTech focusing on engineering skills for sustainable development. Our Faculty was also an active organizing partner of the programme. The workshop could be followed online and in person and was attended by representatives from several partner universities of the EELISA alliance, including FAU, ITU, and UPM. Our Faculty and University were represented in person by Orsolya Barna, International Coordinator.

There is a growing expectation for engineers to better integrate sustainable development practices and issues into the design, construction, operation and maintenance of products and services.

Though sustainable development was defined almost 40 years ago, it had a renewed impetus in 2015 with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Diverse skill and learning outcome frameworks for sustainable development education have recently emerged at different scales, for example, the European Sustainability Competence Framework.

The workshop was structured around two objectives, one to foster consensus among EELISA members on the engineering skills needed to support sustainable development. The other is to share successful experiences that can be replicated among the EELISA network members.

In the morning of the workshop, the most important frameworks of sustainability competences were presented, such as the European Commission’s Sustainability Competence Framework (GreenComp) and the UNESCO Sustainability Learning Goals. The university partners shared their local initiatives and good practices with the participants. The corporate sector was also represented by Hungarian sustainability experts from Deloitte, Schneider Electric, KPMG and Mol participating in an online roundtable discussion on sustainability competence needs from the corporate side. At the end of the successful workshop, the participants identified the key actions for the near future in terms of integrating sustainability engineering skills.

The main vision of the EELISA alliance is to develop a European degree for the next generation of European engineers. The future engineers will be ready to work in an interdisciplinary, multilingual, diverse and pan-European environment and will contribute to transforming Europe into a just, sustainable and prosperous society with a modern and sustainable economy. In line with this, the EELISA Disciplinary Broadening Workshops aim to engage research, education, industry and society in the process of disciplinary broadening aiming to realize the overall vision of EELISA.