Summer School for Sustainability 2025 - learning global and local through collaboration

This summer school aims to build awareness for sustainability and incorporate it into the participants' perspective for their daily and professional lives. Therefore, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a blueprint to achieve a better and sustainable future for all, and the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which assess the advance of scientific knowledge about climate change, are utilized. The participants are divided into topic-centered groups in order to work on the 17 SDGs and most recent IPCC reports, taking the chapters of the IPCC reports as a starting point. Through the course, the participants learn to set their own perspective with respect to the IPCC and the SDGs and reflect on how to implement them in their daily routines.

The educational input is accompanied by the interactive simulation game Sustain2030. Here, participants take the role of a stakeholder in a fictitious citizens council supporting the federal government. In this context, they need to find political compromises between the different interests and aspects with limited financial resources. Using Sustain2030 the participants will learn about the interconnectedness of the SDGs and the complexity of participative processes. The participants are encouraged to actively take part in (political) discussions in order to become self-efficacious, solve problems, and set the experience into the context of the course.