Abstract:

Embedding sustainability across higher education is crucial for preparing future professionals to address the environmental, social, and economic challenges of the twenty-first century. Universities play a key role as catalysts for a sustainable and resilient society. By integrating sustainability competencies into curricula, they can foster systemic thinking, innovation, ethical leadership, and collaboration.

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) developed GreenComp, the European Sustainability Competence Framework, as a unified model to guide learning in environmental sustainability across all educational levels. Building on this, the GREENVERSITY project adapted GreenComp to higher education through the Greenversity CORE Framework of Sustainability Competences. It articulates each competence domain in terms of distinct components of knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs), structured within a taxonomy that strengthens conceptual precision and practical applicability.

This is an example of "Valuing sustainability” competence:
- General definition: to reflect on personal values; identify and explain how values vary among people and over time, while critically evaluating how they align with sustainability values.
- Knowledge objective: to understand that sustainability is shaped by diverse and sometimes conflicting value systems, and can describe how worldviews (such as anthropocentric, technocentric, and ecocentric), cultural, generational, and socioeconomic factors influence sustainability perceptions and decisions, while recognizing that inclusive engagement across all value systems is essential.
- Skills objective: to demonstrate the ability to critically assess, compare, and deliberate on different sustainability values and principles, integrating these into personal and collective decisions and actions while recognizing environmental impacts and diverse perspectives, and the importance of cooperating across differing worldviews rather than relying solely on one’s own values.
- Attitude’s objective: to demonstrate openness to reflect on personal values critically, respect diverse cultural perspectives, and adopt a reflective, inclusive attitude grounded in sustainability principles.

To foster effective implementation, a three-level rubric has been designed for each KSA category (level 0–red, level 1–yellow, and level 2–green), guiding educators in the progressive evaluation of competence development and ensuring alignment with course learning outcomes.

In conclusion, the GREENVERSITY CORE Framework provides significant benefits for its various target groups. For educators, it provides explicit methodological guidance and practical tools (such as KSA descriptors and rubrics) to integrate and assess sustainability competencies systematically across disciplines. For students, it enables a more comprehensive and transformative learning process that cultivates systems thinking, critical reflection, and socially responsible action. Higher education institutions and academic leaders gain access to a coherent and scalable model for embedding sustainability within curricula and quality assurance systems, enhancing institutional innovation, visibility, and societal relevance. Moreover, policymakers and accreditation agencies can adopt the framework as a standardized, empirically grounded reference to support policy coherence, benchmarking, and progress toward common European objectives in sustainability education.

Keywords:

Green competencies, digital skills, higher education, sustainability.