Abstract
In 2016, the United Nations (UN) launched the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework for sustainable development and a sustainable future. However, the global challenge has been to engage, connect, and empower communities, particularly young people, to both understand and deliver the 17 SDGs. In this study, we show the benefit of a strategic planning-based experiential learning tool, the Young Persons’ Plan for the Planet (YPPP) Program, to improve the underlying competencies of Australian and Mauritian adolescents in increasing understanding and delivering the SDGs. The study was conducted with 300 middle to senior high school students, in 25 schools throughout Australia and Mauritius, over an 18-month period. The intervention included the development of research, strategic planning, management, STEM (Science Technology, Engineering, Maths) and global competency skills in the students, to enable them to build and deliver regional and national SDG plans. Research methods included pre- and post-intervention testing of the attitudes of these students to sustainable development outcomes and compared these attitudes to subsets of scientists and the Australian national population. Our results, from both qualitative and quantitative evidence, demonstrate significant improvements in these adolescents’ appreciation of, and attitudes towards, the SDGs and sustainable outcomes, across a range of key parameters. The results from the 76 students who attended the International Conference in Mauritius in December 2018 demonstrate significant improvements in mean levels of understanding, and attitudes of the students towards the SDGs awareness (+85%), understanding/engagement (+75%), motivation (+57%), and action orientation/empowerment (+66%). These changes were tested across a range of socio-demographic, geographic, and cultural parameters, with consistent results. These findings have significant implications for the challenge of sustainable education and achieving community engagement and action towards the SDGs in Australia and Mauritius, particularly for young people. As the intervention can be replicated and scaled, the findings also highlight the opportunity to extend both the research and this type of experiential learning intervention across both broader geographies and other generation and community segments.
Highlights
IntroductionAddressing the Challenge of Community Engagement in Delivering the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Sustainable Outcomes
Impact of the Intervention on Awareness, Understanding, Motivation, and Action Orientation towards Sustainable Outcomes (i) Our results demonstrate that there was a significant impact of the program on the first research question on adolescents’ awareness, understanding, motivation, and action orientation in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), climate change and renewable energy
The outcomes of this research have highlighted a number of opportunities for intervention programs to achieve sustainable outcomes, as well as for further research in the pursuit of sustainable outcomes
Summary
Addressing the Challenge of Community Engagement in Delivering the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Sustainable Outcomes. With 194 countries signing up to this framework, the UN SDGs, provide the global agenda for a sustainable future. Whilst this is a major step forward in the collective agenda of sustainable development, the challenge is, and will continue to be, how to engage, connect, and empower communities to deliver these Goals. The ability to ‘think global, act local’, and to engage and empower individual countries and communities to become engaged and empowered to deliver these goals, proved to be a challenge, even with the more limited scope of the MDGs as compared to the SDGs [2]. Remain for the successful implementation of the SDGs i.e., (i) Education for sustainable development [3] (ii) community engagement: To demonstrate applicability of the SDGs to local economic, ecological, and social contexts; and, (iii) community empowerment: To take action to implement the activities that will fulfill the Goals [4]
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