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News 2025
Leadership for a sustainable world - UNIC International Sustainability Autumn School
Postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers and academics from around Europe took part in a week-long sustainability leadership programme at the Sustainability Institute Ellen Hutchins Building, University College Cork, from 13 to 17 October 2025.
Led by UCC Sustainability Academy, the training marked the culmination of the UNIC International Sustainability Autumn School, an Erasmus+ funded ‘blended intensive programme’ focused on nurturing future ‘sustainability leaders’. These are the all-important individuals who will inspire and drive us towards a more sustainable world and have the competences to understand and tackle sustainability challenges under conditions of extreme urgency, rapid change, and uncertainty.
The Autumn School targeted the development of leadership skills and sustainability competences which complement the deep domain-specific knowledge acquired within academic disciplines: such as systems thinking, futures thinking, sustainability values, societal impact, and interdisciplinarity.
The School was developed through the UNIC European Universities Alliance, bringing in academic expertise from across the partner universities as well as drawing on living laboratory methodologies for co-creation, critical reflection, and experiential learning - as developed and refined within the UNIC Centre for City Futures. It is hoped that it will be repeated across UNIC partner universities for future impact.
Dr Paul Bolger, Head of UCC Sustainability Academy said that “the shaping of a sustainable and flourishing world is one of the great leadership challenges faced by society. Within the UNIC Autumn School, universities are playing a crucial role in responding to this challenge by cultivating within its students and learners the interdisciplinary knowledge, action oriented skills and sustainability values that are aligned with living on a planet with finite resources”.
Antti Pekka, a participant from the University of Oulu, Finland commented: “The Autumn School has allowed us to work together across disciplines and cultures from across Europe which creates a more complete perspective that is better than any single institution could do. I see the School not a traditional course with a beginning and end, but rather the start of a long term European network of knowledge on sustainability that I can continue to draw on”.
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