The development towards a sustainable life and a sustainable society is the central challenge of our time, which is becoming increasingly virulent, especially due to advancing climate change and its consequences, but also due to other ecological problems, pandemics, war and social inequalities. In education as well as in research, universities therefore have a duty to participate in a transformation of society and to actively advance it.

RUB is guided by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which follow a broad concept of sustainability in the sense of ecological, social and economic sustainability. UNESCO has identified Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) as a central element for its implementation. In Germany this is written down in the National Acion Plan on ESD 

, which includes different areas of education and aims to structurally establish ESD.

ESD is part of the concrete implementation of SDG4: Quality Education. At the same time, it is a building block for the implementation of all goals, as it enables the SDGs to occur in different educational contexts and thus become better known and critically discussed. ESD means building competences that are necessary for the transformation to a sustainable society and that therefore particularly combine knowledge, reflection, attitude and action.

The National Action Plan on ESD also prescribes binding goals for the higher education sector that must be achieved by 2030. In addition to the policy, which is to create the corresponding framework conditions, these also affect all internal university actors. For example, researchers and lecturers are to undergo further training in order to integrate sustainability-related research more strongly into teaching and to develop new teaching formats in the sense of ESD. Student projects should also be more strongly integrated into teaching so that the university as a whole experiences a sustainable transformation.