Recently, national and international incentives, policies, and legislation have intensively focused on the sustainability of the resources and implementation of activities to involve different target groups in sustainability and climate change actions. At the UN Sustainable Development Summit (2015), the world leaders adopted the 2030 agenda to deal with certain issues, such as providing quality education, responsible consumption and production, and tackling climate change by 2030. On the other hand, the Paris Agreement (2015) and the European Green Deal (2019) have emphasized the issues directly and indirectly related to climate change. In this project, we want to contribute to these strategies using empowering the target groups (via training and awareness-raising activities) to take action to prevent certain environmental problems such as climate change, lack of sustainability, inefficient resource usage, waste generation increment, lower recycling ratio of wastes, energy efficiency usage, water shortage.
Consequently, the LEAF project aims to raise awareness for and provide fundamental knowledge to higher education students and staff (both academic and administrative) in the field of sustainability, of which several main themes and subjects already embrace the crucial issues of environmental protection and the fight against climate change. Within this context, it is of great significance to comprehend the basics of environmental, social, and economic sustainability pillars and their relation with other fields such as climate change, waste management, energy resources, and circular economy. Therefore, we aim to develop a self-learning-based e-certificate program for both the students and staff (administrative and academic), which will be organized in a modular structure to present knowledge in the main fields of sustainability, as well as other customized areas related to different disciplines and specific fields of sustainability implementation. Using a "self-learning-based e-program infrastructure" will facilitate access to the program, decrease dependency on space and human resources, and increase the effectiveness of the learning and teaching activities. A mobile application will also be developed within the project, which will allow the users to calculate their daily/weekly carbon footprints and monitor/compare their progress. The application will provide information about the main sustainability issues and carbon footprint reduction precautions and also encourage the users to enjoy activities such as daily tips, challenges, notifications to decrease their footprints and quizzes. From this comprehensive perspective, the project directly embraces innovative teaching practices for the planning, implementation, and improvement of an e-certificate program for providing training and awareness-raising activities in the field of sustainability, with a focus on lifelong learning motivation and gamification techniques.