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UN Conference

WU employee is the education expert of Austria’s Rio+20 delegation

Rio+20, expected to be the largest United Nations summit of all time, will be held June 20-22. 20 years after the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development will be attended by highly distinguished policymakers and businesspeople as well as thousands of civil society stakeholders and global major groups. Seconded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, WU's Philipp Schöffmann (29) from the Institute for the Environment and Regional Development is Austria's education expert on sustainable development.

Focusing on "Green Economy", Rio+20 brings together decisionmakers from all over the world in order to agree on targets and measures against poverty and social injustice and for clean energy and better conditions for sustainable development. In addition to top-level political talks and negotiations, the agenda features hundreds of events dealing with sustainable development. With more than 50,000 participants, Rio+20 is one of the largest events of its kind in the world.

Austria's delegation to Rio

With his expertise in education on sustainable development, Philipp Schöffmann (29) from WU's Institute for the Environment and Regional Development will represent the Federal Ministry for Education in Austria's delegation, which is headed by Federal Minister for Environment Niki Berlakovich. Schöffmann will take part in political negotiations as well as in the official university networks side event "Aiming Higher, Unlocking Tertiary Education's Potential for Sustainable Development", representing the WU-based Regional Center of Expertise (RCE) Vienna and focusing on RCEs as best practice models.

RCE Vienna: a network for more sustainability

RCE Vienna is the regional expert network for science and research, education, and transregional sustainable development, RCE Vienna head and WU employee Christian Rammel explains: "RCE Vienna acts as an interface and promotes the exchange of knowledge and information between initiatives, organizations, universities, companies, and other stakeholders concerned with sustainable development." The platform deals with solutions to current challenges such as immigration and social cohesion, climate change, ecomobility, and sustainable entrepreneurship. For Philipp Schöffmann, representing Austria at Rio+20 is an honor: "I am very much looking forward to contributing RCE's expertise in Rio."

Find out more about Rio+20 and the RCE Vienna.

Contact and information:
Cornelia Moll
Press officer
Tel: + 43-1-31336-4977
cornelia.moll@wu.ac.at
http://blog.wu.ac.at