6 October 2020, online and Berlin: European Forum on Science and Education for Sustainability 2020

[Daniel-Mietchen]

as per https://www.efses2020.eu/en/ .

Upon registration, they had asked for my motivation to attend, and I had posted the following:

I would like to participate in the workshop for two main reasons:

• (i) sustainability-related issues and climate justice in particular are attracting a lot of engagement from younger people, and I am interested in the effects that this has on the spread of knowledge and action
• (ii) I see the open sharing of knowledge and educational resources as a key component of a transition towards greater sustainability.

They also asked about my prior activities in this space, for which I had posted the following:

I have been working on open approaches to research and education for well over a decade, leveraging the social and technical opportunities that web-based technologies provide, e.g. as per

https://w.wiki/dTo (2012) or http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4031806 (2020).

The School of Data Science where I work was founded just about a year ago, so working on policies was and still is a big part of that endeavour. Besides, I have been involved in international policy work, e.g. as part of an expert group of the European Commission https://op.europa.eu/s/oli9 or a curriculum task force https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004943 . I am also involved in a project to develop an ontology for educational interventions.

I am a member of the University of Virginia's Sustainability Committee https://sustainability.virginia.edu/about-us/committee-sustainability and a volunteer in various sustainability-related contexts, e.g. https://w.wiki/DsD .

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Hashtag: #EFSES2020

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Some observations from the plenary session:

• https://netzwerk-n.org/ is a student-led initiative that tries to transform the German higher education landscape towards more emphasis on sustainability
• ETH Zurich report from 2018 found that about half of ETHZ's CO2 emissions were due to air travel
• Ørsted has been labeled "the most sustainable company in the world"
• question I posted in the conferencing tool had bubbled up to the top and was thus posed to the panelists

  • "What approaches have proven successful to get decision-makers to stop subsidizing fossil fuels?"

  • summary by Johan Rockström: "we're failing - we should be penalizing the use of fossil fuels, not subsidize it."
• Leopoldina document on Sustainability & Education
• Science Based Targets Network
• form with questions displayed during the workshop sessions:

  )