Summer School for Sustainability 2025

Students, lecturers and staff of Ruhr University Bochum (RUB), University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) and TU Dortmund University spent five days working intensively on the topic of sustainability.

The Summer School for Sustainability took place from September 08 to 12 and like the year before also in the second round it was organized and held by volunteer students, lecturers from the Clinical and Biological Psychology Research Group and the Spatial Modelling Lab as well as the Sustainability Office of TU Dortmund University. Besides in 2025, personnel support was provided by the sustainability certificate coordinators of Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) and University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE). In addition to TU Dortmund University students, students from the both other universities also participated, so the summer school can be seen as a comprehensive UA-Ruhr collaboration.

The aim of the summer school was to build awareness for sustainability and set these principles into the participants' perspective for their daily and professional lives. Therefore the participants dealt with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a blueprint to achieve a better and sustainable future for all, and the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which assess the advance of scientific knowledge about climate change. They used both to carry out a transfer to their own universities.

22 students (14 TUDo, 6 RUB, 2 UDE) successfully participated in the Summer School and thus not only completed the basic module with 3 credit points for the studium oecologicum or the sustainability certificates of RUB and UDE, but also acquired skills that enable them to actively engage in political and societal discussions, empowering them to become more self-efficacious in problem-solving and applying their experiences from the Summer School to real-world contexts.

Encouraged by the dynamic during the Summer School and the positive feedback from the students, the organization team would like to continue offering it and develop it further together with interested students and lecturers.

Impressions from the Summer School

One of the highlights of the Summer School was the interactive simulation game Sustain2030. The students took roles of stakeholders in a fictitious citizens' council supporting the federal government. They needed to find political compromises with limited financial resources. The participants learned about the interrelationships of the SDGs, the complexity of participative processes and were encouraged to actively take part in (political) discussions.

The Summer School ended with a poster presentation that visualized the learning outcomes of the student groups. They tried to figure out how their chosen IPCC-chapters "Current Status and Trends", "Future Climate Change" and " Responses in the Near Term" are connected to the different SDGs and transferred their findings to their universities. As the posters are well worth seeing and in recognition of the students' efforts, the Sustainability Office is currently considering the posters can be presented again during the Sustainability Week in June 2026. The student groups have already reported back that they are interested in presenting the posters to a wider audience. Stay tuned, more information will follow.