Sustainability: The New Paradigm

Abstract

Chapter 1 deals with the critical environmental and social themes that characterize the present scenario, generated and intensified by a development model characterized by a high growth rate, which has contributed to stressing the difference between conditions of ‘wealth’, to the advantage of the few, and conditions of ‘poverty’, which are progressively expanding, with alarming environmental repercussions in particular on the climate change front. Illustrated below are the main initiatives activated by countries, institutions and other organisms with the purpose of producing cultural change oriented towards sustainability and a review of the current development model, which takes shape in the endorsement of declarations and definitions of agreements with which commitments to sustainability are formalized. In this context, the universities have a very important role in the creation both of knowledge and of educational models that support this new sustainability paradigm.