Recently AUK undergraduate students of EPAM School of Digital Technologies had a meeting with professor Benno Werlen, UNESCO Chair on Global Understanding for Sustainability at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. The meeting was organized as part of the course Technological, Social, and Sustainable Systems. Benno Werlen is the founder and executive director of the International Initiative for an "International Year of Global Understanding" approved by the General Conference of UNESCO.
The speaker made a presentation to the students on the topic «Global Understanding for Sustainability: The Jena Declaration» and drew attention to the IT role in sustainable development and soft skills implementation. Describing the results of online conference “Humanities and Social Sciences for Sustainability" prof.Benno Werlen stressed:
“The key results were to change or to improve the impact of current sustainability policies. First, we need to move away from the idea from uni-versality to pluri-versality. We shouldn't imagine one future for all people on the planet, but we should think about different futures for different cultural constellations. Secondly, we have to give up the idea of the ecological approach. It's not about protecting the environment, because we are part of the nature, so it's protecting our own world, not the environment. Therefore, it's primarily a societal and cultural endeavor to change towards global sustainability”.
Also, he stressed that today knowledge is not enough. We have a lot of knowledge, but it's very complicated for humans to adapt scientific insights into the change of the daily practices. So we need other approaches driven by arts, literature and other esthetic practices.
At the end of the presentation, the speaker had a discussion with students about the impact of consumer culture on sustainable development opportunities on the example of developed countries.
We are highly thankful to professor Benno Werlen for his lecture and discussion with students of BSc in Software Engineering.
Dnipro
