Environmental Sustainability: Sustainable Construction Education – a UK Case Study

In December 2002 the UN resolution 57/254 designated the period 2005 to 2014 as the “Decade of Education for Sustainable Development” (UNESCO, 2005). Since then UK policy makers have taken steps to place sustainability at the heart of university education (HEFCE, 2002; DfES, 2003). However, centres of university provision exist that have been responding to the sustainability challenge for over a decade; this paper analyses one such case. In 1996 the first students enrolled on a suite of environmentally themed construction related degrees at the University of Plymouth, England, coined the ‘Environmental Building Degree Programme’ (EBDP). The EBDP was unique at the time in overtly theming environmental issues within a professionally oriented building/construction curriculum. This paper examines the rationale for creating degrees of this type, concluding that the environmental impacts of buildings warrant inclusion of such issues in construction-related courses. Attempts to evaluate the impact of the environmental theme of the degrees were carried out in 2003 and 2004 by undertaking student perception surveys followed by a 2005/6 sustainability audit of the curriculum. In drawing together the findings, it has been found that the EBDP clearly embraces and embeds environmental knowledge and skills relating to construction, although, the broader aspects of sustainability receive much less attention. While separate surveys indicate that awareness of sustainability amongst environmental building students maybe higher compared to students on un-themed building courses or on similar but un-themed vocational courses within the same institution, the key challenge that remains is to find ways of effectively integrating broader sustainability issues within what is already a full vocational curriculum.