“Life Science Universities and the UN Sustainable Development Goals” - the world is facing numerous and severe challenges. More than 800 million people globally live in extreme poverty and are facing hunger. More than half of the land used for agriculture is degraded thereby affecting 1.5 billion people globally. Climate change affects livelihoods all over the world and puts severe threats to survival in many areas. In order to address these multiple challenges, the resolution “Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in September 2015. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) presented in this agenda break new ground in several ways: probably the strongest paradigm shift is that they are valid for all countries.

In this context, universities are increasingly called upon to contribute to reaching the ambitious goals and need to conceptualize their role beyond slight and cosmetic adjustments of their missions, their research proposals, their teaching activities and their evaluation criteria for achieving relevance in the crucial transformations required. In preparing for the workshop, a draft position paper on “The role of Universities in achieving the SDGs” will be developed by a GCUA-SDG task force. It is the final aim of the workshop to finalise the position paper and set the stage for GCUA spearheading this process for Life Science Universities.

Online registration is open until March 1st, 2018 at  
 - in case of problems, please send an e-mail to gcua2018(at)boku.ac.at .

Further information

05.02.2018