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On the afternoon of Thursday, a round table on the theme "The role of universities in the objectives of Sustainable Development" was held in the Degrees Hall of the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Murcia, in which José Ballesta Germán, Mayor of the City of Murcia;
Jorge Solana Crespo, advisory member of the High Commissioner of the Agenda 2030. Government of Spain, and Santiago García Granda, Rector of the University of Oviedo and President of the Sectorial Commission of CRUE-Sustainability.
The round table was moderated by the Rector of the UMU José Luján.
The activity is framed in the initiative ODSesiones UMU, the bet of the University of Murcia for the fulfillment and development of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) within the framework of the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations.
Until April 2021 the University of Murcia will devote a month to disseminate and raise awareness about each of the seventeen objectives, which correspond to major problems that the world society must face in the coming years.
City and University, a common birth
Mayor Ballesta referred to the traditional relationship between universities and cities, since, he said, "universities arose in cities in medieval times," and explained that it was said that "in cities there is an air of freedom in opposition to the most feudal Europe ", the same freedom that was exercised in the universities from the first moments.
Cities are the preferred habitat for human beings today: "the world has never been as urban as it is now", since, for the first time in the history of mankind, more than 50 percent of the earthlings inhabit in cities, and affirmed that, by the year 2030, more than 70 percent of humanity will live in them.
He specifically referred to Murcia, a city of almost 500,000 inhabitants, in which 30 percent of its population has settled in it in the last 20 years.
Ballesta offered other striking data on the importance of cities in the world, such as the fact that in only four of them live more Nobel Prizes than in the rest of the world.
It is also about the cities where more universities are established, so we can infer that "in the cities it is not only where there are more people, but also where knowledge, development and technological innovation are found".
"The cities said - will mark the future of humanity."
"Cities are the new engines of the global economy, but at the same time, they are the main players in environmental projects".
He affirmed that the city model for Murcia is based on four fundamental areas: territorial, productive, social and cultural model.
"We are aware," he said, "that this can not be imported, and that it is necessary to be rooted."
Finally commented that in the City of Murcia "we have implemented our urban agenda and the University of Murcia has been fundamental in its development," assuring that without the professors and researchers of the University of Murcia, this would have been impossible.
193 countries united against 17 challenges
For his part, Jorge Solana, member of the High Commissioner for the 2030 Agenda of the Government of Spain, said that the Agenda tries to respond to the challenges of Spanish society.
"For the first time, 193 states have agreed to sign a document that identifies the major challenges of the world in 17 differentiated objectives and attempts to pave the way to provide solutions to these challenges."
He said that the Agenda marks a way forward to be able to coordinate and find solutions to global challenges, and affirmed that it is necessary to mobilize the whole of the citizenship to take ownership of the Agenda and feel that these challenges, such as inequality or poverty, it affects them directly and they have to get down to work in the search for solutions.
"We do not understand the 2030 Agenda global action without a global citizenship that gets involved in it," he said.
He assured that the Agenda is still unknown in the country, and that it is necessary to transfer and disseminate the issue to society to incorporate more people to this company, a company, in which, he assured, the university has much to say .
Train university students to face challenges
Lastly, Santiago García Granda, Rector of the University of Oviedo and President of the Sector Commission of CRUE-Sustainability, said that the fundamental role of universities with respect to the SDGs is the generation of human capacities.
He commented that the CRUE is a club of 76 universities, whose mission is to coordinate the potential of the universities to be more efficient.
"We have the mission of being centers of excellence," he said, "we train people and we make them acquire competences", adding that "we try to increase the capacities of people, that is the mission of our universities, because we are aware that the better our university students are trained, the better our society will be. "
Universities can contribute to the challenges defined in the 2030 Agenda by forming on different fronts, he said.
"We have to aspire to be a model of management and resources, we can orient our teaching towards sustainable development and try to develop lines of research that help to implement those objectives." We must try to make the university a sustainable development laboratory " , he finished.
Source: Universidad de Murcia
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