2019 年 10 巻 2 号 p. 21-25
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), consisting of 17 goals and 169 targets regarding the economic, social and environmental objectives to achieve global sustainable development by 2030, have received considerable attention not only in politics but also in business and research. Although many stakeholders have recently tried to integrate the concept of SDGs into their activities, most of Japanese people do not know SDGs according to a previous survey. SDGs can comprehensively explain current problems and challenges from a more holistic perspective, therefore SDGs can be a powerful tool to discuss the sustainability at universities. However, fundamentally,the level of sustainability awareness among Kyoto university students is still unclear. Here we conducted a questionnaire survey targeting Kyoto University students to investigate their knowledge and awareness of SDGs and to reveal how Kyoto University students aware the sustainability. This survey (n = 144) showed that 106 respondents (73.7%) know SDGs and the most common source of information from which they first became aware is “class”. We demonstrated that their personal understanding and importance is different regarding the 17 goals and find a gap between students’ impression about how well Japan has been achieved and the reality. Importantly, many Kyoto University students know SDGs but most of them do not fully understand all the 17 goals and their current implementation, even though they think that the goals are important for their daily lives. Thus, it is necessary to connect SDGs with our daily interests, such as food,health, safety, etc., in order to improve approaches to inform university students about the concept of SDGs. These results offer an important insight into SDG knowledge and awareness at Kyoto University and help to accelerate education for sustainable development.
