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The hoped-for “just recovery” from the COVID-19 pandemic has not occurred. This chapter examines socioeconomic disparities laid bare by the pandemic in the United States. They have left a marked impression, suggesting that the concept of “American exceptionalism” has negative as well as positive connotations especially when compared with other high-income countries. Strikingly, democracy is not delivering for many Americans, and yet that is not a new situation, as much scholarship shows. These findings challenge received wisdom about how this country is in the aggregate labeled “developed” when many Americans live in conditions similar to or worse than those the World Bank categorizes as “developing.” Against this background, the chapter assesses experiential learning models for engaging students on the SDGs to assess these disparities. While researching social justice gaps in Pittsburgh and Atlanta with Carnegie Mellon students, however, the lack of disaggregated data emerged as a human rights issue and major barrier to fulfilling the SDG principle to “leave no one behind” (LNOB). These findings suggest a paradigm shift is needed, using the SDGs to advance human rights, elevating socioeconomic rights, localizing issues, generating disaggregated data to drive policy recommendations, and scaling up the community of practice that is engaged in this paradigm shift. Field building these aspects of sustainable development has the possibility to positively shape policies, outcomes, and help this democracy actually deliver for all, not just for some. For the United States to lead and bolster human rights and democracy around the world, inequalities at home must be addressed.

The application of Earth Observation (EO) science to sustainable development has become increasingly accessible. This is partly due to an open science movement concurrent with increased popularity of both higher education partnerships and the concept of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The confluence of these movements presents a unique capacity building opportunity: to provide emerging professionals with the ability to capitalize on open EO data and software, leveraging them for sustainable development across various thematic areas. The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework and case study illustrating how academic partnerships can catalyze the integration of ESD on a small scale in postsecondary education.

This paper presents a novel capacity building approach via the co-development of higher education curriculum by SERVIR and ITC. SERVIR is a U.S. government initiative of NASA. ITC is the University of Twente’s Faculty of Geo-Information Science and EO. This paper integrated SERVIR’s open-source EO tools into courses at ITC, building the capacity of students to apply such tools to address real-world environmental challenges.

This paper provides a case study indicating that educational partnerships can strengthen the ESD approach of a Higher Education Institution (HEI) by providing local environmental challenges and open-source tools to combat those challenges, while simultaneously strengthening the capacity building strategies of both institutions.

While educational partnerships have pursued curriculum development initiatives, the literature is limited in approaches that supplement existing courses with curriculum materials co-developed with an external partner. This paper provides a framework and case study of this smaller-scale collaboration for HEIs wishing to leverage external partners to use ESD in the higher education classroom.