Donald Trump recently repeated a favourite joke (false, naturally) about climate change simply meaning “more beachfront property” as a result of rising sea levels.
But nobody was laughing at Times Higher Education’s Global Sustainable Development Congress last week.
Taking place in Bangkok, and with many of the participants hailing from South-East Asia, the challenges posed by the climate crisis were deadly serious day-to-day realities.
As the Malaysian minister of natural resources and environmental sustainability observed, deaths from heatstroke are a daily occurrence for his fellow citizens. And the very existence of such a ministerial brief tells a story about how central these concerns are for the region.
How, then, did those on the front line judge our collective effort to address the complex challenges of sustainability?
First and foremost, there was recognition both of that complexity and of the need for collective action – in terms of university collaboration and cross-sector initiatives.
There was also a clear message that there are major issues of global equity to be resolved – a duty on developed countries to support the efforts under way in the Global South.
Another thread running through discussions was about the need for balance between global and local action, and the need for sustainability to shift from a concern that was separate from the day to day, to – as one delegate put it – a world in which “every job is a climate job”.
The event saw the launch of THE’s latest Impact Rankings, which assess universities’ contribution to addressing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Coverage of that is to be found both in our news pages and in the Impact Rankings supplement.
Unusually for a THE event, many of the speakers were from industry, government and non-governmental organisations – deliberately so, given the cross-sector solutions required.
But among university leaders, there was recognition both of the importance of higher education – not least in convening these other groups – and of the limits of its influence.
As Dawn Freshwater, vice-chancellor of the University of Auckland, put it: “we have to recognise that we aren’t always going to be the people leading the conversation.
“We can convene the conversation, but a bit of humble pie wouldn’t go amiss – we won’t always be the ones leading.”
This acceptance of the limitations of any individual organisation was noted by others, too.
One banking expert from Thailand said financial services could be just as “self-centred” but that banks also had to accept that theirs was primarily a facilitating function.
Freddy Boey, president of City University of Hong Kong, made a point about scale: that focusing on global challenges was fine when talking about the “why?”.
But when it came to solutions – the “how?” – it was necessary to focus the lens. His suggestion was to think about action at the level of a city, where it is possible to bring together the mix of government, industry and higher education required to make things happen.
Both leaders also picked up the thread of hope and optimism, as well as the need to embrace change.
Freshwater offered a healthy challenge, arguing that universities were undergoing a “crisis of leadership, and perhaps of ideas” that needed to be recognised and remedied.
In a UK context, this has been greatly exacerbated by a government that has sought to marginalise rather than champion the sector.
But for Boey, “universities today have a great opportunity to redefine their future”.
He continued: “You will always have things that no other organisation in the world has…every year, clever people, with brains coming out of their ears, rush to get into universities. So you have great talent in the form of young people, and you hold them in your hand for four years.”
He highlighted the importance of innovation and spin-off companies in giving those young people high-quality employment opportunities in a changing world.
But, he said, above all else “universities provide one thing to young people: hope. Nowadays young people don’t trust the government. Whether that is right or wrong, I don’t know. But I can tell you that every young kid will have hope to get into university and create their own future.”
At a time when the challenges of sustainability seem overwhelming, and the challenges of sustainable higher education in a UK context can seem equally insurmountable, that is a message worth being reminded of.
With support, and the self-awareness to recognise the ways in which they can contribute by convening cross-sector collaboration, universities can play their part in diverting humanity from the shores of disaster.
As for Donald Trump, neither support for universities nor self-awareness is his strong point.
But if he were to notice those pointing out that climate change will actually create less beachfront property, as land areas diminish, even he might feel a tinge of gratitude for universities’ efforts.
