In what kind of world do we want to live? What future do we want for our children? These questions, which are leading the global debate on a new development agenda, were discussed in the international conference “Education is the Key – Towards a Global Post-2015 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. It was held on 16 June 2014 in the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in Bonn. The conference served as a platform bringing together the views of western scholars and practitioners with the views of our partners from emerging economies about the role of the UN decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) for shaping the future by addressing all three dimensions of sustainability.

At the beginning DIE-Director Dirk Messner opened the conference with his keynote underlining the importance of environmental sustainability, poverty eradication and inequality reduction in the post-2015 agenda which can only be pursued by an appropriate education. He stated that we now live in a period of the third Great Transformation in history following the Neolithic revolution and the Industrial revolution. It consists of a revolution towards sustainability: “We have to reorganize prosperity, education and democracy within the planetary boundaries.” Messner said that for this transformation we would need the right vision, technology, crisis, and knowledge: “We humans are the new drivers of the earth system”. 

Following the keynote, participants could choose between three sessions on selected topics of each of the three dimensions of sustainability. The afternoon programme included a panel discussion on sustainable consumption followed and three inputs (including one input of the DIE-Researcher Steffen Bauer) on the role of education in the climate change. The conference was concluded by a summary and recommendations from Alexander Leicht (UNESCO) and Ingrid Jung (GIZ).