NAFSA Trends and Insights, May 2021
Public awareness of the severity and scale of the climate challenge has grown markedly of late, in no small part due to the increasingly visible effects of a changing climate coupled with public activism. Unsurprisingly, this shift in climate-consciousness has also begun to make itself felt in the field of international education (IE).
Until recently, it was a rare IE practitioner who drew a direct line between his or her work and action on climate change, whereas now, most major IE conferences include reference to environmental sustainability. This is a vital shift given the potential for climate change to
disrupt the operating environment of higher education dramatically within a matter of decades.
That this realisation has arrived just as a global pandemic wreaks havoc on traditional forms of physical mobility creates a moment of reckoning for the IE sector. International Education Sustainability Group (IESG) co-founder Ailsa Lamont explores designing a sustainable international education sector in this edition of NAFSA Trends and Insights.