Morphological box for ESD - landmark for universities implementing education for sustainable development (ESD)

Universities have various options to implement higher education for sustainable development (ESD) into curricula and syllabi, and incorporate sustainability into students' daily routine and life on campus. Despite considerable progress they have made in the last years, a comprehensive system for ESD that goes beyond good practice examples is still missing. This gap becomes obvious in surveys applying a systems approach to ESD, describing emerging research areas, mapping opportunities of responsible management education or identifying future trends for ESD. Seeking to close the gap, the opportunities of how to implement ESD into universities' curricula and syllabi are arranged to a comprehensive system covering all possible options: the so-called "morphological box for ESD". The methodology applied to develop the morphological box for ESD is the morphological approach. The morphological approach provides a powerful heuristic tool for creative problem solving, used to investigate the totality of realizations of multidimensional, non-quantifiable phenomena, like ESD implementation. The morphological box for ESD provides more than 70 million opportunities to implement ESD. Universities may use this morphological box for ESD to find out their unique profile and develop proper ways to implement ESD. The morphological box for ESD is the first of its kind.