Launching the Education First Initiative in September 2012, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, highlighting the connection between education and development, said, ‘Our internationally agreed development goals are a complex tapestry and education is the indispensable thread’. The initiative aims to ensure quality, relevant and transformative education for everyone. Its three priorities are to ensure that every child goes to school; that the quality of learning is such as to be transformative; and that it inculcates a sense of global citizenship.

The Education First Initiative recognizes education, throughout the document, as a major driver of change to achieve environmental sustainability, sustainable living, gender equality, economic opportunity, health and in inculcating a sense of being a responsible global citizen. As the Sustainable Development Goals evolve, this initiative provides an opportunity for ESD to be integrated into strategies and work programmes as a key driver to achieve these goals.

At a recently held UN DESD Reference Group meeting, during a session to discuss the ‘Advancing Policy on ESD’, one of the major components of the proposed framework on ESD post 2014, the group noted that the DESD has promoted the use of ESD, built capacity in governments and in NGOs, created a global network of individuals and institutions and generated several projects that in turn have built a rich base of experience on ESD.

This experience needs to be documented and communicated to relevant policy-makers at the local, national and international levels to build the necessary credibility for ESD to be used as one of the key tools to achieve sustainability. ESD not only supports quality education at school and higher education levels, but also supports nations in implementing their Sustainable Development strategies and plans as well while contributing to achieving the goals of the climate change, biodiversity and desertification conventions and the Marrakech process.

The current issue of the journal comes in the year that marks 20 years of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held at Rio de Janeiro in 1992. At that time, along with Agenda 21, came the three important multilateral environment conventions on climate change, biological diversity and desertification. This was a period over which the concept of ESD evolved.

The UN DESD started in 2005 and UNESCO was given the responsibility to be the lead agency on behalf of the UN. And so, 20 years after Rio, the authors felt it would be appropriate to ask the DESD secretariat at UNESCO to compile and edit a special section which would help explore the way ESD has evolved over the three conventions. UNESCO has contributed to the special section on ESD to this issue of JESD.