How can innovations in sustainability education be scaled rapidly? A dynamic analysis

Abstract

Abstract Society faces a ‘critical decade’ to accelerate climate action and transition towards a sustainable future. Doing so demands rapid scaling of innovations in higher education to build capacity. Many high-quality educational tools are freely available and some are known to motivate evidence-based climate and sustainability action. Most efforts to propagate these tools rely on outreach and word-of-mouth diffusion. But these approaches typically achieve little. We develop and analyze a dynamic computational model to understand why and to test other propagation strategies. Our analysis reveals that outreach has limited impact and does little to accelerate word-of-mouth adoption under conditions typical in higher education. Instead, we find that community-based propagation can rapidly accelerate adoption, as is also shown by a small number of successful real-world scaling efforts. Without coordinated, community-based propagation, it is unlikely that we will meet build the capacity needed to address climate and sustainability challenges.