3 Foreword executive sumary The UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, 2012) was a landmark event in the history of sustainable development in that countries agreed to a ‘Future We Want’. Twenty years ago the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, 1992) provided for Agenda 21 that laid the framework for sustainable development. Chapter 36 specifically addresses reorienting education towards sustainable development, and encompasses all streams of education, both formal and non-formal, basic education and all the key issues related to education for sustainable development. Actions to achieve this resulted in a series of initiatives around the world at national, regional and global levels. During the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002, 11 of the foremost educational and scientific organisations in the world signed the Ubuntu Declaration with a goal to strengthen collaboration between science and technology researchers and educators, to better integrate science and technology into educational programmes for sustainable development, for all subjects and at all levels, and to strengthen cooperation between formal, non-formal and informal education. Education for sustainable development (ESD) is seen as not just environmental education nor even sustainable development education, but “education for sustainable development”. ESD covers not only environment and natural resources management but much broader topics such as poverty alleviation, gender, peace and dispute settlement, inter-cultural understanding, democracy and others. The Regional Centres of Expertise on ESD (RCEs) were established to mobilise many and serve to give focus to their contributions in creating, jointly, a global learning space for sustainability. We are living in a time of profound change in an increasingly interlinked world. These changes are for both better and worse. The role and relevance of education has continued to attain importance with countries vying for top spots in ensuring education provides for development as well as the economic empowerment of its people. Biodiversity, traditional knowledge, poverty reduction all are topical today for the linkages that exist on the ground where communities have time and again proved that their knowledge and practices outweigh the risks associated with technology-based interventions to achieve sustainable development either as a macroeconomic component or as a micro-enterprise led development. Recognising the need to learn from the ground and collate the experiences of communities on issues of managing natural resources, especially biodiversity, sharing the same, contributing to local wellbeing models, this publication comes at an appropriate time when the topic of ‘Biodiversity and Livelihoods’ has recently received significant attention at the eleventh meeting of Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD CO P 11) in Hyderabad, India in October 2012. The case studies examined in this publication are characterised by local expertise being brought together for transformative learning. Be it the bio-cultural approaches or the contexts of today’s policymaking, the case studies demonstrate the need for three key approaches to ensure education for sustainable development is successful. First, the need for ‘learning by doing’, second, the value of learning from practitioners and third, the importance of collective interventions. I am confident that this publication will further enhance the visibility of RCEs as key hubs for knowledge and experience based learning and congratulate the authors and editors for their efforts. Balakrishna Pisupati Chairman, National Biodiversity Authority Chennai, India September 2012
Traditional Knowledge and Biodiversity
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