Sustainability, Society and You

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Sustainability is one of the big global issues of our time. It is crucial that we all play our part in protecting our world for current and future generations. This course provides you with the knowledge and skills to do this by investigating sustainability from multiple angles and exploring what small steps you can take to have a real impact upon all our futures.

The course team includes academics and postgraduates from many disciplines and is led by Professor Sarah Speight, from Nottingham’s School of Education. Through videos, readings, activities and discussions, you will explore sustainability from the perspective of the environment, the economy, health, politics, society and culture, education and community.

You will be encouraged to look at your own behaviours and undertake activities such as measuring your water footprint, conducting a waste audit, researching, blogging and sourcing images. We encourage course participants to find, produce, share and discuss resources for sustainability.

The University of Nottingham is an education partner of IEMA, the Institute of Environmental Management & Assessment. IEMA’s role is to support individuals and organisations to set, recognise and achieve global sustainability standards and practice. Nottingham and IEMA are pleased to be working collaboratively on this course.

Recommended reading

Why not download some of our free eBooks to help you read around the topic and be ready to join the discussions. Extracts from these books are used throughout the course.

Or find out more in Sarah’s post for the FutureLearn blog: “What do the new UN sustainable development goals mean for you?”

This course is intended for anyone with an interest in sustainability. It does not require any prior experience of studying the subject.

1. Introducing sustainability
2. Big issues for our world
3. Sustainability and society
4. Past, present and future; learning for sustainability
5. Seeking sustainable solutions
6. Sustainability and you

Through videos, readings and discussions, you will explore different perspectives on sustainability including:

• economic
• political
• social and cultural
• historical
• arts
• engineering
• business
• learning
• geography
• personal perspectives

You will be encouraged to look at your own behaviours and undertake activities such as blogging, sourcing images and carrying out a waste audit. We encourage course participants to find, produce, share and discuss resources on sustainability.

If you are interested in the topic of sustainability and can’t wait until the course starts, then why not download some of our free eBooks to help you read around the topic and be ready to join the discussion. Extracts from these books are used throughout the course.

This course has been put together using material generated by The University of Nottingham, in combination with material from third-party ‘Creative Commons’ licensed sources. The principle of sustainability has been upheld throughout the production of the course through the re-use of this openly licensed material. In turn, The University of Nottingham content within this course and the course structure is being made openly available under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons licence . This means you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and to make derivative works as long as you: attribute the authors of the work; don’t use the work for commercial purposes; and if you alter, transform, or build upon the work, you distribute the resulting work under a licence identical to this one.

In addition to the University of Nottingham content, you will see a variety of third-party resources that are available under a variety of Creative Commons licences. You are free to use these too, just make sure you follow the rules of the licence that you see alongside the particular resource that you want to use.

We would very much like to thank all of the individuals and organisations whose Creative Commons resources are included, or have been adapted, as part of this course. You are champions of sustainability in our eyes.