Humboldt-Scholarship
‘Sustainability and Global Justice’

The aim of the group was to establish a ‘Studium Oecologicum’ (ecological studies program) at the HU Berlin to anchor the idea of sustainability in teaching.

The ‘Studium Oecologicum’ was thought of an interdisciplinary module within the ‘Studium generale’, where students could choose to acquire basic competences from the spectrum of sustainability, ecology and human-nature-interactions. These competences should be acquired from existing seminars offered by the HU and supplemented by the teaching of basics in extra courses. They were bundled in one module and certified for the students.

See final results (in German) here: Poster Studium Oecologicum

The Studium Oecologicum still exits until now and rejoices steadily growing popularity amongs HU students. It is now merely organized by the student-driven Sustainability Office at the HU. More information can be found at their Website.

At the project ‘Transparent Institute’ the focus of the students lied on the quantification of natural resource consumption within the university through electricity, material usage and procurement.

In this context, the Geography Department in Adlershof was chosen as a pilot-institute. After the first phase of resource quantification, the second part of the project should be organized in cooperation with students and staff, aiming to determine potentials and to implement strategies of resource consumption reduction. The overall long-term objective of the project was to design a catalogue and corresponding guidelines for sustainability measures for the university as a whole.

The research group ‘Sustainability of the Corporate Partners of Humboldt-Universität’ aimed to investigate to which extent sustainability plays a role in the selection of Humboldt University’s strategic and corporate partners.

The first goal was to create an initial baseline study taking stock of the current partnerships, culminating in a critical evaluation of sustainable economic and strategic activity undertaken in the academic sector. In addition to investigating partnerships and selection processes of the university, the group illustrated possible challenges and opportunities for sustainable partnerships based on more specific case studies. One particularly visible example for such a case study was the Humboldt-Store, whose wide array of products invites questions of both ecological and social sustainability in the selection of the producers.

See final results (in German) here: Poster Unternehmenskoop