What is the Sustainable Futures Academy?
The Sustainable Futures Academy is a distinctive international program focusing on higher education and accelerating the effectiveness of higher education in addressing sustainability both within its own core business and as partners to all other sectors in society. For complete information, please visit the SFA website at www.sustainablefuturesacademy.org

Why the Sustainable Futures Academy?

• There is a need for a North/ South collaboration partnership that would see a flow of information and skills between advanced countries and countries that are developing, with a common purpose to drive sustainability.
• The energy and the confidence as well as the experience of the people who come to this platform to contribute in a meaningful way to some of the great challenges of our time.
• Bringing leaders from different sectors, different countries, different cultures and different experiences together will always have a positive effect.
• Higher Education institutes have a great potential to bring in sustainability at the theoretical, the philosophical level as well as the practical level.

The Leadership Development Program
The first pilot program to be developed focuses on Executive Leadership Development for Sustainability. We have chosen this as our first program for development because there is a profound lack of targeted sustainability programs for executive leaders in the higher education sector. There is also general consensus that executive leaders represent a high impact group that can have a substantial multiplier effect on a variety of higher education arenas, including operations, teaching, research and community service. To guide us in this effort we have convened a Leadership Advisory Council of leaders and experts in sustainability in higher education and related fields from all over the world. This Council has confirmed that a new paradigm of leadership is required in order to drive sustainability into the core business of higher education. In order to lead for sustainability, higher education leaders must be able to understand the following:

• What it means to drive sustainability into the core business of higher education
• How to align sustainability with a variety of existing higher education and immediate organizational priorities
• How to understand and leverage the business case for sustainability and how to adopt the triple bottom line
• How to lead the necessary breadth, depth and pace of change in complex higher education organizations and what it takes to undertake the journey from initial little victories towards profound systemic and cultural change
• How to address ethical and equity considerations that underpin global success

Why the Leadership Development Program?
By turning our attention to the higher education sector and specifically to the development of the executive leadership skills to lead sustainability through higher education, we believe we are turning our attention to one of the most impactful and high leverage pathways to foster large scale transformation in society towards a sustainable and just future.

The Vision for the SFA
The SFA’s primary goal is to form a dynamic network of select universities, businesses and donor agencies eager to foster interdisciplinary thinking in the search for solutions to the climate challenge and to encourage synergies between institutions in the northern developed and the southern developing worlds where student populations are rapidly growing and impacts of environmental degradation are experienced most acutely. The SFA seeks to provide a vital platform for international innovation collaborations, and for helping organize and take to scale promising pilot projects stimulated by the SFA process.

The envisioned network of partner institutions will allow for accelerated transfer of relevant learning, strategy and implementing models, and will assist participating institutions in framing sustainability as an issue of critical importance in all regions of the world. It will enable the higher education sector to address climate change at local, regional, national, international levels in direct support of the UN Convention on Climate Change. SFA collaborations will mobilize students, faculty, administrative leaders, employers and community organizations to tackle sustainability-driven (economic, political, social) changes through teaching and training, research and development, “Greening the Campus”, regional economic impact and community service. This will be achieved through the development and dissemination of programs and services that have proven success in removing barriers, creating the right incentives and fostering essential capacities.

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