Sustainability

The University’s Four-Year Plan 2022-2025 proposes a number of initiatives to address the major challenges identified in its strategic framework. Sustainable and societal development is strongly emphasised, through the implementation of four major achievements:

• The preparation of an institution-wide action plan to integrate the principles of sustainable development into research, education, dialogue with society, and campus development and management;
• The creation of a new interdisciplinary centre focusing on environmental systems;
  The launch of an institutional sustainability initiative focusing on the functioning and operations of the University;
• The strengthening of quality education as a pillar of a sustainable society.

These axes are materialised in the Multiannual Convention 2022-2025 signed between the State and the University.

Education, research and outreach, and operations

At the University of Luxembourg, salient disciplinary research and teaching to describe specific sustainability challenges that are set in specific systems is established, and the development of key interdisciplinary research areas including on transport/mobility, health economics, ecological economics, economic geography, socio-economics and demography studies, and Green ICT is well underway.

All three faculties offer learning opportunities and research programmes across a wide range of disciplines that equip students in different ways to address diverse sustainability challenges.

Departments and research units across all three faculties and the three interdisciplinary centres have developed projects and conduct research that address selected sustainability challenges.

Combining natural science and engineering with critical perspectives from social sciences and humanities on the functioning of our society is required in order to better understand and act upon complex social-ecological systems. A new field of transformative sustainability science is emerging, in which researchers, civil society, private enterprise, and governments collaborate with the goal of transforming how society and environment interact.

Finally, in order to achieve the ambition of being a sustainable university in all its aspects and to introduce more coherence in its actions among its missions, the University is also focusing on the operational sustainability of its functioning and its campuses. This implies analysing the impact of its activities but also involving the operational structures in order to integrate the elements of sustainability into the University’s operating processes.