AUK Champions Sustainability Education with Heba Al-Farra’s SDG Integration Talk

The College of Business & Economics (CBE) partnered with AUK’s Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) to welcome engineer Heba Al-Farra, UN Environment “Young Champion of the Earth” and Projects Supervisor at Enertech, as the keynote speaker in a faculty development series on sustainability‐driven teaching. Drawing on her regional leadership in the “Women in Energy & Environment” initiative, Al Farra introduced her talk, “Integrating Sustainable Development Goals into Academic Curricula,” by inviting faculty to re-imagine their classrooms as launchpads for global impact.  
 
Al-Farra began by outlining why universities can no longer treat the 17 SDGs as peripheral topics. Embedding them, she argued, not only cultivates responsible global citizens but also strengthens interdisciplinary learning, aligns programs with labor-market demand for sustainability skills, and elevates institutional reputation and funding potential. “Universities are drivers of societal transformation,” she reminded attendees, urging AUK to leverage its teaching and research to address climate action, equality, and inclusive growth.  
 
The lecture then offered a practical roadmap. At the course level, faculty were shown how to map learning outcomes to one or two SDGs, redesign assessments around real-world sustainability challenges and launch cross-faculty modules. Institutionally, she recommended establishing an SDG curriculum committee, integrating the goals into strategic plans and using tools such as Sulitest, THE Impact Rankings and curriculum-mapping templates to monitor progress. Al-Farra also addressed common hurdles—time constraints, accreditation pressures and resource gaps—pairing each with modular solutions and success stories from universities worldwide.  
 
Al-Farra closed with a phased action plan such as awareness campaigns, pilot SDG courses and green-campus audits—before scaling to full curricular and operational integration by 2030. Her call to “act now” resonated with faculty, underscoring CBE and CTE’s shared commitment to positioning AUK as a regional leader in sustainability education. 
  
  
  

Eng. Heba Al-Farra during her talk