Global climate changes are not just ON the international political agenda these days. Aside from the war in Iraq, it is safe to say that climate changes ARE the international political agenda. A number of people have contributed to this state of affairs, among them former VP of the United States Al Gore's documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth', the report by Sir Nicholas Stern, head of Britain's government economic service, to Chancellor Gordon Brown outlining the future costs of global warming and The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report in which they remarked that it was "very likely" that human activity is the cause of global warming.

The findings in all this work all point to one thing: The way we have set up society and our economy has a profound and global impact on the living conditions for animals, plant and people. This again gives rise to the question of sustainability. Is the current development sustainable, or are we undermining the very basis of our own existence?

Sustainable development is also an important topic for schools and pedagogics, and so we use this issue of the Danish University of Education Quarterly to ask a question: Can schools and pedagogics contribute meaningfully towards a sustainable development? According to the UN, the answer is 'Yes', as demonstrated by the organisation's nomination of the decade 2005-20014 to the Decade for Education for Sustainable Development, ESD.

Does this mean, then, that schools have to be frontrunners for energy-saving measures and replace all the broken windows? Or does it mean the pupils have to learn everything there is to know about ecological production? Perhaps, but the real aim with ESD is something deeper, as you can read in an interview with two DPU-professors, Karsten Schnack and Bjarne Bruun Jensen, who are both involved in the DPU research program Environmental and Health Education. Who can make do with less, and who should be allowed to spend more energy, in our struggle to slow down the climatic changes? This is a political issue, which is also underlined by Nicholas Stern's report: How do we appreciate the cost of a reduced consumption today against the problems our descendants will face from climatic changes? And how much sense does economic theory make in relation to the debate about our climate? The pedagogical task of ESD is to teach pupils to address these issues.

In his article, Søren Breiting explains about a development project in Thailand, where a number of schools have been involved in ESD. This led to a change in the very traditional – some would say old-fashioned – pedagogics in Thai schools. Monica Carlsson and Jeppe Læssøe have used pedagogical methods to teach staff in hotels and restaurants to conserve energy; they found that inclusion of the employees and space to discuss conflicting objectives were the means to success. And finally Jeppe Læssøe has written an article about inclusion of the general population in efforts to establish sustainable development. Based on experiences from the work with Agenda 21, which was launched at the UN Climate Summit in Rio in 1992, Jeppe Læssøe has identified a new type of professional mediators who organise this inclusion of the citizens. Jeppe Læssøe argues that these mediators ought to learn to think in didactical terms, for instance by reflecting on potential conflicts between local inclusion and global issues.

And finally we bring you three out-of-topic articles: One discussion of freedom and why freedom does not necessarily make us free, one article about prevention of relapses for criminals by having them live alongside non-criminals, and finally an anthropologist's take on why 'The Good Academic Paper' is different, depending on whom you ask – something the poor students have to struggle with on a daily basis.

We hope you enjoy
Lars-Henrik Schmidt
Rector