I’m happy to share a new piece I wrote together with Maike Land and Dorit Schumann for the In Focus section of IAU Horizons (Vol. 30, No. 1). Our article, “Transforming Forward: Shaping the Sustainable Future We Want,” is a short, practice-oriented argument for why higher education needs to move from “sustainability as an add-on” to sustainability as a core institutional purpose.

As we approach the milestone year 2030, progress on the SDGs remains fragmented—and universities’ transformative potential is still often underused. We argue that Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) needs to become a cornerstone of institutional strategy, not a standalone project. That implies a Whole-Institution Approach: embedding sustainability across teaching, research, knowledge transfer/community engagement, governance, and campus operations—so learning isn’t only about sustainability, but happens through institutional practice.

A second emphasis is interdisciplinarity in the strong sense: sustainability challenges can’t be solved in disciplinary silos, and they can’t be handled as purely technical problems. We make the case that science and technology need to be actively connected with culture, values, and the arts/humanities—because futures are not only engineered, they are also imagined, narrated, and negotiated.

“The future we want is not predetermined; it is shaped by the decisions and commitments we make today.”

If you’d like to read the issue, you can find the PDF here (our article starts on p. 31 of the PDF).

Source: IAU Horizons Vol. 30 No. 1 (June 2025), “Transforming Forward: Shaping the Sustainable Future We Want” by Jacobus Bracker, Maike Land, Dorit Schumann.