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Education for Intercultural Understanding seeks a better world. Its principal goal is education for change through addressing social issues with an intercultural perspective arising at the local, national and especially international levels. Underpinning this cross-curricular dimension is education for a sustainable future - a core concern of Environmental Education.This article will review Australia's engagement with international and intercultural education within formal education with a specific focus on its contribution to a sustainable future. It identifies recent influences that have shaped school policy and practice in this area. Lost opportunities are discussed as well as the scope for future developments, in particular within the socially critical fields of Citizenship Education, Futures Education, Global Education and Anti-racism Education as well as Environmental Education and Education for Sustainable Development. This paper is an extract from a recent report commissioned by the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Centre for Education for International Understanding (APCEIU).

Climate change is already with us. It is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time. The effects of changing weather patterns and more extreme climate events can be seen around the world. Examining the scale of the global challenge through the threats posed by a changing climate across Europe and in the UK, this paper indicates that leadership and policy responses are needed at all levels – international, European national and local. The urban environment amplifies the impacts of climate change and adaptation of our towns and cities is essential to accommodate this change. Regional and local planning can make a major contribution to tackling climate change by shaping decisions that reduce carbon dioxide emissions and positively build community resilience to problems such as extreme temperatures or flood risk. Looking to examples of best practice across local authorities in Europe, the EU-funded green and blue space adaptation for urban areas and eco-towns (GRaBS) project is showcased. This paper presents the case for climate change adaptation and, in particular, argues that people or places facing poverty and disadvantage must not be disproportionately affected by climate change, or by policy or practice responses to it.

One key aspect of the Anthropocene is the inherent disparities between the Global North and the Global South. These differences manifest in the causes and impacts of pollution, climate change, and species extinctions, but are they also present in the ways we write about the Anthropocene? We examine 77 peer-reviewed papers spanning 2009-2019 that explicitly feature conservation in an Anthropocene context. We compare these papers to a control group of papers that feature conservation but do not engage specifically with the Anthropocene literature. We found that both "Anthropocene" and "conservation" papers include a disproportionately large number of authors with affiliations in the Global North, despite half of the research taking place in the Global South. Moreover, this overrepresentation occurs regardless of author position or journal impact factor. We find that 84% of Anthropocene articles and 91% of conservation articles occurring in the Global North had a first author from the country of study, as opposed to only 55% of Anthropocene articles and 62% of conservation articles from the Global South. Studies occurring in the Global North almost always had at least one coauthor from the country of study (96% of Anthropocene articles and 97% of conservation articles). In contrast, only 81% of Anthropocene articles and 83% of conservation articles occurring in the Global South had any local coauthors. We used two text-mining algorithms to characterize the authorship networks and topics occurring in Anthropocene and conservation papers. These analyses showed that while both groups are interdisciplinary, Anthropocene papers had more distributed authorship networks and greater linkages across topics, and therefore have a flatter "topic surface" than the conservation papers. Our work suggests that conservation research programs that are explicitly grounded in the Anthropocene as a theoretical framework are more likely to reach across disciplinary lines.