Presse

María J. Cantalejo Díez, Professor at the Public University of Navarra (UPNA) and main coordinator of the co-funded Erasmus+ project NEMOS, gave a conference on How to transfer the sustainability competences through green pedagogies and service-learning at the 12th International Conference on Sustainable Development – ICSD 2024, on 12 September 2024 in Rome, Italy. In particular, Prof. Cantalejo focused on the final project results of NEMOS, consisting of practical sessions held to train university lecturers who teach in different degrees to effectively integrate sustainability in Higher Education.

The International Conference on Sustainable Development was organized by the European Center of Sustainable Development in collaboration with the Canadian Institute of Technology – CIT. ICSD 2024 was inspired by the critical challenge of human, environmental, and economic sustainability concerning present and future generations in a global-scale context. The conference theme was Creating a unified foundation for Sustainable Development: research, practice and education, aimed at emphasizing the strong foundation that is provided by using research to inform our everyday practices, policies, and analytical approaches.

The 2024 edition provided a forum for sharing ideas, presenting research findings, and discussing professional issues relevant to Sustainability Science. This ambition proceeded in a multidisciplinary way across various fields and perspectives, through which we can address the fundamental and related questions of Sustainable Development.

As an outcome of the given conference, the article entitled Transferring sustainability competences through green pedagogies and service-learning in Higher Education has been published in the European Journal of Sustainable Development in February 2025. Access the article.

María J. Cantalejo Díez, Professor at the Public University of Navarra (UPNA) and main coordinator and leader of the co-funded Erasmus+ project NEMOS, organised and chaired the NEMOS Dissemination Day “A new educational model for the acquisition of competences in sustainability through service-learning.”

This conference was held on 18 October 2024 from 10:00 to 12:00 at the Public University of Navarra (UPNA) in Pamplona, Spain. The event focused on the presentation of the “Methodological Manual on Food Sustainability through Service-Learning,” the result of the joint work of the NEMOS consortium. The manual gathers the main lessons learnt, as well as the recommendations collected throughout the process, with the aim of facilitating decision-making for teachers and higher education institutions that want to begin integrating or deepening the integration and promotion of sustainability competences in curricula and daily classroom practice.

Maria J. Cantalejo stated that the NEMOS project is fully transferable to all UPNA bachelor’s and master’s degrees, as one of today’s societal challenges is the integration of sustainability competences in all areas. Furthermore, she highlighted that in order to achieve the acquisition of the proposed competences, collaborative work should be carried out among different disciplines within the same field.

Key partners of the UPNA team (Maite M. Aldaya, Carlos Vilches, and Isabel Navarlaz) also participated in this session and agreed on the importance of integrating sustainability in Higher Education, supporting the continuous dissemination of the NEMOS project. As a result, interdisciplinary work teams were created, bringing different and complementary perspectives to achieve the objectives of the NEMOS project across various degree programs.

The session was recorded on video (both the programme and the video in Spanish are attached). The NEMOS project received recognition as an Example of Good Practices by the European Union.