The exploitation of natural resources, the pollution of the oceans, deforestation, global hunger: After numerous global problems appeared on the political agenda for the first time in the 1970s, it became evident following the Brundtland Report (1987) that the lifestyles of the western industrialised countries could not spread to the entire current or future global population without bursting the earth’s limits. The green light for the international sustainability discourse was given.
10 years after the world community finally decided to base its political action on the model of sustainable development, in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, and after the interdependence of sustainable development and education was realised, the UN Decade project “Education for Sustainable Development” was proclaimed on the recommendation of the Rio+10 World Summit in Johannesburg. In doing so, the UN member states committed themselves to entrenching the principles of sustainable development in their education systems.
Against this backdrop, the ESD Expert Net was brought into being in 2010 at the behest of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. The goal: To put international dialogue about education for sustainable development on an equal footing and to exchange ideas with important emerging countries about how education can help to solve global problems.