Sustainability education must move beyond awareness-building to equip students, professionals and communities with the skills to translate climate and development commitments into action, policymakers, academics and sustainability leaders said at the 8th International Conference on Sustainability Education (ICSE) 2026 in New Delhi.
The two-day conference, held under the theme “Sustainability Education for Transformative Action,” brought together policymakers, educators, scientists, industry leaders and young people to examine how education systems can respond to climate change, resource pressures and the demands of a rapidly evolving green economy.
Pradip Burman, Chairman of the Mobius Foundation, said the gap between climate commitments and implementation remained too wide. He pointed to India reaching 50% of its installed electricity capacity from non-fossil sources in 2025, five years ahead of its 2030 target, while stressing that targets alone would not deliver the transition.
A recurring argument across the conference was that sustainability could no longer be treated as a standalone environmental subject.
“Sustainability has outgrown its old framing as a purely environmental subject. It is no longer simply an environmental conversation but a conversation about how we live, how we learn, how we work, how we create prosperity and ultimately how we create well-being and wellness for people and the planet,” said Priyanka Sharma, President and CEO of the Mobius Foundation.
Discussions ranged from future-ready education and skills for the green economy to critical minerals, e-waste, battery recycling, sustainable agriculture, population stabilisation and health systems. Speakers also examined the role of green curricula, upskilling and reskilling, women as climate leaders, rural transition and the relationship between commercial growth and sustainability.
For Ambuj Sagar, Professor and Head of the School of Public Policy at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, one of the central challenges is ensuring that sustainability knowledge does not remain confined to universities and institutions.
“Sustainability education is enormously important at this time. It is diverse and complex. When professionals become policymakers, the education stops at the institution level. Commitments become real only when the capacity becomes local,” Sagar said.
The need to begin that process much earlier was underlined by Manjima Chatterjee, Head of Sustainability Programs at Shiv Nadar School.
“We need to create capacity for wonder right from the school level, to think what is good for the planet is good for you. It also involves taking the parents along, because we want change now and parents are decision-makers,” she said.
Kartikeya Sarabhai, Founder Director of the Centre for Environment Education and a Padma Shri awardee, placed the debate in a longer historical context, noting that the conference comes close to the 50th anniversary of the 1977 Tbilisi conference, a landmark in the development of environmental education.
Sarabhai also proposed that every school and educational institution adopt one square kilometre of land around it as a practical learning space where students could work on around 30 sustainability-related indicators and interventions linked to the Sustainable Development Goals.
Several academics said the complexity of the sustainability transition required universities to break down traditional disciplinary boundaries.
“Interdisciplinarity is key because you can’t see it from one lens. Systems design case examples are important. Quantitative skills also need upskilling, practitioner engagement is important, field visits are important,” said Radhika Khosla, Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Oxford.
Vishal Garg, University Chair Professor and Director of the Indorama Ventures Center for Clean Energy at Plaksha University, said institutions also needed to rethink how technical education itself was organised.
“Interdisciplinarity is difficult, so we have removed it. We have only research centres on water, energy, food, etc. We need to see how technical education needs to be imparted,” Garg said.
Ibrahim Hafeezur Rehman, Director General and CEO of NAMTECH and Director of its School of Sustainability, said awareness of climate change and environmental, social and governance issues had increased substantially among students, but the ability to develop and implement solutions had not kept pace.
“There are a lot of students now who are aware of ESG, climate change, but we have limited people who can talk about solutions. Sustainability cannot be siloed. It is about cost versus carbon, productivity versus resource mobilisation. Sustainability needs to be a pathway across disciplines, a thinking that needs to be integrated horizontally across systems,” Rehman said.
Speakers also warned against treating sustainability purely as a question of technology.
Sunita Narain, Director General of the Centre for Science and Environment and a Padma Shri awardee, delivered one of the conference’s sharper interventions, linking recent disasters in the Himalayan region, including in Nepal, to decades of what she described as an engineering mindset that assumed rivers and mountains could be re-engineered at will.
The consequences of development choices, speakers said, made it necessary for sustainability education to include political, social and civic dimensions alongside science and technology.
“Sustainability education should therefore equip learners not only with environmental knowledge, but also with the capacity to engage as citizens in shaping those transformations,” said Bhaskar Vira, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education and Environmental Sustainability and Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge.
Across the sessions, the message was that growing climate awareness among young people would have limited impact unless it was matched by institutional capacity, technical skills, systems thinking and opportunities to apply knowledge in real-world settings.
The challenge for education systems, speakers said, is no longer simply to convince students that sustainability matters, but to prepare them to make decisions, design solutions and manage the trade-offs involved in putting it into practice.
