The essence of a university’s mission is to make the world a better place through the advancement of knowledge and ideas.
In this time of climate breakdown, universities have the power to provoke what the environmental campaigner George Monbiot calls a “new moral imagination” about how to improve the lives of people across the globe and the planet as a whole.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have an overall relevance to governance. Governors should make it their business to understand, monitor, and support the goal of building effective, accountable and inclusive institutions. The governing body of a university can occupy a leading position in this social discourse. By holding university executives to account, governing bodies can show their communities that they can see the environmental crisis from other perspectives.
