Professor Mandy Sadan (Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes in GSD) >> Well I think we’re all used to thinking about Global Sustainable Development in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations (UN). But I think we also know that come 2030, a lot of those goals won’t have been met. So we need to think about different ways of thinking about what Global Sustainable Development means.

We’re all used to thinking about it in terms of social relationships and human relationships, but clearly, given the present climate emergency, we need to think about our interactions with the environment aswell.

And it’s not even about acting on a global scale. In my own work, I tend to work very locally and think about how the local impact of my work feeds into a bigger picture.

Professor João Porto de Albuquerque (Director of Postgraduate Research and Director of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development) >> Global Sustainable Development for me means that we are looking to combine different disciplinary perspectives to look at how we do development more sustainably. That draws two things together. One is sustainability – that is development that is good for the generations of today but which also thinks of the generations of the future. The other thing is to think globally, to think across the Global North and South which means we’ll be looking at really how to accomplish sustainable development goals like the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Dr Stéphanie Panichelli-Batalla (Head of the School for Cross-faculty Studies) >> To me, Global Sustainable Development means making a difference and working towards contributing to making the world a better place, but it has also become something else since I joined GSD [at Warwick] because I have joined a team of colleagues and students who are really passionate about making that difference. It’s not just about my contribution now, it’s about this shared contribution and share passion that we have. It’s not just about academic staff and the research and our students, it’s also even about our professional services staff who have this same passion to make a difference.