Insufficient progress has been made five years after the Earth Summit in Rio as it has been recognized by the international community. The Thessaloniki Conference has benefited from the numerous international, regional and national meetings held during 1997 in India, Thailand, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Greece and the Mediterranean region inter alia. In order to achieve sustainability, an enormous co-ordination and integration of efforts is required in a number of crucial sectors and rapid and radical change of behaviours and lifestyles, including changing consumption and production patterns. For this, appropriate education and public awareness should be recognised as one of the pillars of sustainability together with legislation, economy and technology. Poverty makes the delivery of education and other social services more difficult and leads to population growth and environmental degradation.
Poverty reduction is thus an essential goal and indispensable condition for sustainability.
A collective learning process, partnerships, equal participation and continuous dialogue are required among governments, local authorities, academia, enterprises, consumers, NGOs, media and other actors in order to raise awareness, search for alternatives and change behaviours and lifestyles, including consumption and production patterns, towards sustainability. Education is an indispensable means to give to all women and men in the world the capacity to own their own lives, to exercise personal choice and responsibility, to learn throughout life without frontiers, be they geographical, political, cultural, religious, linguistic or gender. The reorientation of education as a whole towards sustainability involves all levels of formal, non-formal and informal education in all countries. The concept of sustainability encompasses not only environment but also poverty, population, health, food security, democracy, human rights and peace. Sustainability is, in the final analysis, a moral and ethical imperative in which cultural diversity and traditional knowledge need to be respected.