The World Commission on Environment and Development promoted the concept of ‘sustainable development’ in the late 1980s. ” ..Until then, environment and development tended to be thought of as two distinct actions—the need to promote development on the one hand and the need to protect the environment on the other. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the environmental side of sustainable development emerged as a main focus. Poverty eradication was viewed as important but the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21 which were the main documents to emerge from the Earth Summit, laid priority emphasis on the importance of protecting the natural environment. They recommended that there be a global partnership to conserve, protect and restore the health and integrity of the Earth’s ecosystem.”.
In Paragraph 105 of the Final Declaration endorsed by all countries states the following:

• Education for a sustainable future should engage a wide spectrum of institutions and sectors, including but not limited to business /industry, international organizations, higher education, government, educators and foundations, to address the concepts and issues of sustainable development, as embodied throughout Agenda 21, and should include the preparation of sustainable development education plans and programmes, as emphasized in the Commission’s work programme on the subject adopted in 1996. A more fully developed paradigm of sustainable development was endorsed at the highest political levels at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, in 2002. The Political Declaration states that “sustainable development is built on three interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars”—economic development, social development and environmental protection—which must be established at local, national, regional and global levels.

Recommendations concerning education also appear in each of the action plans of the major United Nations conferences held after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development as well as in the three conventions (on biodiversity, climate change and diversification). For this reason, education can be seen as the cornerstone of sustainable development in all its dimensions.

• Education for Sustainable Development represents a catalytic process for social change that seeks to foster—through education, training and public awareness—the values, behaviour and lifestyles required for a sustainable future. Thus, sustainable development can be seen not so much as a technical concept but as an educational one—not so much the end goal of a government policy but a process of learning how to think in terms of ‘forever’. This means that ESD involves learning how to make decisions that balance and integrate the long-term future of the economy, the natural environment and the well-being of all communities, near and far, now and in the future.
  Education for Sustainable Development is a visionary approach to education that seeks to help people better understand the world in which they live, and to face the future with hope and confidence, knowing that they can play a role in addressing the complex and interdependent problems that threaten our future such as poverty, wasteful consumption, environmental degradation, urban decay, population growth, gender inequality, health, conflict and the violation of human rights.
  The goals of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development is to have this vision of education integrated into education plans at all levels and all sectors of education in all countries.
• 7.1 B.C.Curricula Prescribed Learning Outcomes and K-12 Objectives
• 7.2 Pan-Canadian Objectives of the Council of Ministers of Education of Canada

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