UNIDO is the specialized agency of the United Nations that promotes inclusive and sustainable industrial development (ISID) for poverty reduction, inclusive globalization and environmental sustainability. Technology transfer and business management capacity building are one of the UNIDO's mainstream activities in promoting ISID involving various industrial activities related to chemical engineering. The refrigeration sector, which includes air conditioning, is currently responsible for around 17% of global electricity consumption. For some developing countries this percentage even exceeds 40% of total national electricity demand. Environmentally friendly manufacturing of refrigeration equipment and energy efficient cold supply chain are crucial for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 and beyond. This presentation will share UNIDO's technology transfer examples in contributing to the achievement of the SDGs. In addition, it touches on the scope and share the expected output of this symposium.
Chemical engineering is uniquely placed to drive positive impact across the full spectrum of the SDG agenda. The UN pointed out ‘education is critical for promoting sustainable development and improving the capacity of the people to address sustainable development issues’. We, as the educators in chemical engineering, should enlighten the next generation on a diverse Chemical Engineering for sustainable development.
Diverse dimensions of sustainable development are embodied in the subjects of chemical engineering, yet the profound relations and representations are to be dug out and elucidated. The academia is obliged to explore the potential and boundary of how chemical engineering can make a more sustainable world. As the UN set up the roadmap of SDGs to 2030, people in the chemical engineering community shall contemplate and act proactively on how the instruction activities can be consistent with this process.
Among all the efforts, enhancing the next generation's recognitions of chemical engineering and guiding them to face the challenges matters most. Take my introductory course at Tsinghua University as a case. A group of professors, alumni and experts in the chemical industry are invited to share their understanding of chemical engineering to first-year undergraduates. Extracurricular activities such as practices, voices-from-young-professionals and demonstration videos also help them to draw a big picture. The integration of diverse information from the introductory class presents a wide range of SDG concepts and highlights some of them (e.g. SDG 5-gender; 6-water; 7-energy; 8-work; 9-innovation, 12-consumption and production, 13-climate change etc.), which allows us to think how to integrate SDG into teaching, starting from the freshmen. Inspired by APCChE-UNIDO Symposium, we will further upgrade the course with a systematic outlook of SDG. Hopefully, the discipline of chemical engineering could be enriched with more sustainability by our efforts at least starting from education.
The academic year 2018-2019 marks the introduction of a new 4-year B.S. Chemical Engineering curriculum to the first batch of K-12 graduates in the Philippines. The Commission on Higher Education (CHED), through its Technical Panel for Engineering and Technology (TPET) is tasked with monitoring the implementation of the 2018 Policies, Standards and Guidelines (PSG) on all higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) offering B.S. Engineering Programs to ensure that the attributes of our future graduates are comparable with global standards.
Apart from complying with the CHED-TPET guidelines, the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Santo Tomas is re-engineering its 4-year undergraduate curriculum based on a localized Conceive, Design, Implement, Operate (CDIO) approach that integrates the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The objective is to not only to integrate sustainability principles but also provide an action-oriented, transformative pedagogy, which supports self-directed learning, participative and interdisciplinary collaboration, creative problem-solving, and the linking of formal and informal learning.
An SDG map in the shape of a periodic table addresses specific targets for each SDG across the curriculum and identifies courses or modules where such target can be imparted to students. Similarly, a syllabus map is created for specific courses in order to allow faculty and students to merge awareness of the SDGs with a CDIO approach that will apply innovative solutions to sustainable development issues.
This presentation shall discuss the SDG-based CDIO approach in the preparation of the curriculum and syllabus map as well as issues and lessons learned from the endeavor.
