Sustainability

Welcome to the main page for Sustainability.

Sustainability Tip

Keep an eye out for our 'Sustainability call outs' elsewhere in the toolkit. These have been written to give you practical sustainability tips.

Two people holding a globe in their hands in front of a green forest

Getting Started with Sustainability

One of our three themes, it’s easy to feel daunted at the prospect of yet another topic that has to be added to our curricula and teaching. We hope that these pages will make it clear that sustainability is not just another topic, but rather it can be seen as an overarching frame of reference to inform your choice of teaching methods, materials, and the design of assessments.

Below is a summary of what you will find on the Sustainability pages of this Toolkit:

What do we mean by sustainability?

Here we provide some definitions of what we mean by the terms ‘Sustainability’, ‘Sustainable Development’ and ‘Education for Sustainable Development’.

Why Sustainability?

On this page we will look at the broad context of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, The Well-being of Future Generations Wales Act (2015), and the QAA / Advance HE Education for Sustainable Development Guidance (2021), as well as the narrower contexts of our new strategy, ‘Cardiff University: Our future, together’, and links to the themes of Inclusivity and Employability.

Embedding Sustainability in learning and teaching

This page will look at some practical steps you can take to ensure that sustainability is embedded in learning and teaching in your context, including some ‘Top Tips’, links and resources to get you inspired. We will also look at how you can recognise, highlight and share good practice in the areas of Sustainability and Education for Sustainable Development that you may already be involved in.

Case Studies

Be inspired by case studies from across Cardiff University. Here we include some examples of Employability and Enterprise partnerships, as well as modules that successfully incorporate sustainability content and pedagogies. We also provide links and highlight case studies related to a variety of disciplines from other universities in the UK and around the world.

Deeper dive

Welsh Government (2019) ‘Wales and the Sustainable Development Goals: Supplementary Report to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Voluntary National Review of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals 2030’. Welsh Government publication. Available from: https://gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2019-07/supplementary-report-to-the-uk-review-of-progress-towards-the-sustainable-development-goals-2030_0.pdf  [Accessed on 31/08/22]

Welsh Government (2021) ‘The Co-operation Agreement’. Welsh Government publication. Available from: The Co-Operation Agreement (gov.wales) [Accessed on 31/08/22]

Podcasts: The Spaceship Earth, Coconut Thinking, The Sustainability Agenda

Audible: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Radical Wholeness by Philip Shepherd, The Treeline by Ben Rawlence

Further reading: Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble, Duke University Press; Tsing, A., L., (2021) The Mushroom at the end of the world, USA: Princeton University Press