Our vision

Being a key actor in accelerating systemic and transformational change
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Our vision is a world where everyone understands sustainability, develops a mindset of sustainability, and becomes deeply committed to building a sustainable future via an accelerating planetary movement.

Our mission

Enabling sustainability in organizational practice and outcomes

Our mission is to equip organizations with tools and data that enables them to better design, deliver, and demonstrate the positive impact of their actions to improve the sustainability literacy of their stakeholders.

Sulitest met en avant ses connaissances en développement durable.

Our history

In Rio, in 2012, the idea of building an assessment tool—the original Sulitest—was born during the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Then began the testing phase of Sulitest in correlation with the commitments of the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI) signatories.

In 2013, universities began using the trial version of the new international Sulitest tool. It was also at this time that regional commissions were created to produce the first sets of local questions for the Sulitest tool. After this trial period, a new test platform was launched at the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) in May 2016. From then onwards, Sulitest became recognized as an important driver of sustainability education and assessment. It has strengthened its collaboration with the United Nations organizations and the higher education community ever since.

Picture of Brazil marking the birthplace of Sulitest in 2012 during the UN Conference on Sustainable Development.

Over the past decade, Sulitest has provided online tools and techniques to raise sustainability awareness. Today, the Sulitest tool (now called The Awareness Test), has been taken by over 400,000 people from hundreds of organizations across the globe. What we learned most, however, was how important it was to the educational institutions we worked with, to measure the impact of their efforts in advancing sustainability.

This is why Sulitest decided to increase its overall impact by launching, in 2023, the first online assessment and certificate of sustainability knowledge—TASK™ (The Assessment of Sustainability Knowledge). TASK™ generates standardized data and insights that empower institutions to better equip stakeholders with the tools they need to make positive change in educational programming. The TASK™ assessment process is reliable, easy to implement and use, and globally comparable.

Today, TASK™ is recognized by leading networks, accreditation and quality assurance bodies, and used by over 100 institutions in 20 countries.

Discover the TASK™ community

Contribution and collaboration for sustainability

Given the challenges humanity faces, we believe we must go "beyond our egos, beyond our logos", as we often discuss with our friends from GRLI (Global Responsible Leadership Initiative). No initiative can, on its own, solve the problems, and the Sulitest movement is just one link in a network of engaged actors, each playing a key role.

For decades, our two co-founders have been involved in numerous networks and initiatives (whether in academic networks, United Nations (UN) initiatives, NGOs, or structures in the social economy), because at the heart of the Sulitest movement is the mission to mainstream sustainability literacy. Therefore, we continuously strive to create connections and find synergies within this community of actors.

Creating a sustainability movement in Higher Education

The history of how Sulitest was born is also a history of how a new movement in Higher Education came to exist. In the Rio+20 Conference, our Co-Founder had a leading role in creating the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI), the first group within the UN system to focus on the needs, opportunities, and most importantly, the role of universities in driving the change we need for our society and planet to prosper.

Today, Sulitest is a co-chair of HESI–alongside UNDESA, UN University, and UNESCO IESALC–facilitating multi-stakeholder discussions, actions, and dissemination of good practices.

Contributing to the 2030 agenda

As a tangible implementation of HESI, Sulitest was recognized in 2016 as one of the first featured initiatives of the UN Partnerships for Sustainable Development Goals. As of 2017, Sulitest became an active contributor to the annual review of the 2030 Agenda through the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF). Ever since, we publish yearly reports showcasing the level of sustainability awareness and knowledge worldwide.

Read our latest report

We also collaborate with several UN entities to create SDG-specific modules (a set of multiple-choice questions with learning feedback) designed to raise awareness about specific SDGs. These modules are offered free of charge to any institution via our Awareness Test. Current modules include: SDG Framework, SDG-7, SDG-11 (focused on Waste Management), SDG-12 (focused on Circular Economy), and SDG-14.

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Facilitating dialogue

As part of our mindset of working with stakeholders and friends "beyond our daily mission”, we are honored to take part in education and industry events that provide opportunities to engage in insightful discussions around sustainability literacy, developing sustainability knowledge assessment, and leveraging data to effect transformative change in higher education.

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Events:

Articles:

Our areas of expertise

Defining a common language

The word "sustainability", while widely and frequently used, remains a contested concept. Conflicting definitions, and assigning different weights to environmental, social, and economic factors, together impeded both understanding and tangible action.

In response, in a year-long process and by engaging the broader community of academic and practitioner stakeholders, Sulitest developed a new model of Sustainability Knowledge.

A unifying framework

To avoid “reinventing the wheel” and to build consensus, we conducted an extensive literature review, and explored the many existing tools and frameworks related to sustainability, competency-based learning, and Education for Sustainability (EfS).

For this reason, we produce referential documents describing how our tools and processus align with competency frameworks such as GreenComp, UNESCO ESD Learning Objectives, and others.

This documentation can be found here.

Making sustainability measurable

Universities have long been valued for graduate employability and research output, often overlooking societal impact. Innovative rankings like QS Sustainability and THE Impact Ratings aim to shift this focus, but the challenge remains: how to measure the real-world outcomes of sustainability efforts beyond input and output metrics?

Our most tangible contribution to sustainability education is the development of our assessment tool called TASK™ (The Assessment of Sustainability Knowledge). TASK™ responds to the two most pressing educational needs today—how to measure student sustainability knowledge and how to generate data that informs curricular revision and demonstrates institutional impact.
In addition, TASK™ scores serve as a compass, helping test-takers and educators identify both cognitive strengths and areas of needed improvement.

Discover TASK™

Helping faculty make a positive change

To increase our impact, we engage in research and project work to better understand the systemic levers, barriers, and opportunities to make higher education more relevant and more impactful.

Impactful Five (i5) pedagogical framework

We partnered with PRME on the Impactful Five (i5) project, which promoted a pedagogical framework to make learning meaningful, joyful, active, social, and iterative (i5). In assessing how educators adopt the i5 Framework, and the teaching and learning impact that resulted, we gained valuable insight into the barriers to, and value of employing innovative and high-impact pedagogical practice.

Learn more

Understanding faculty engagement

Together with universities, business schools, and education networks, we launched a global survey exploring the perception of, and processes by which, faculty and program leaders engage educationally with sustainability. The results provide useful insights into how best to support educators in embedding sustainability into courses, curricula, and programs.