Sustainable development is the great challenge of our time. It is complex and requires us to think out of the box, take multiple perspectives, and invent new solutions. Since its foundation in 1903, the Solvay Brussels School has dedicated itself to training men and women who can tackle such challenges.

Today, sustainable development draws together a number of initiatives across the School that all work towards the same goal: to contribute to the invention of this better world through research, education, outreach, and leading by example. Come and join us in this endeavour.

Catherine Dehon, Dean of the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management - ULB


The Université Libre de Bruxelles is one of the 300+ institutions of higher education that signed the Rio+20 Declaration of Higher Education, each committing to promoting the integration of sustainable development into teaching, research, outreach, and their own operations.

At the Solvay Brussels School, we are proud to contribute to the ULB’s commitments. The School positions itself as an active participant in society’s transformation, using its academic resources and institutional practices to generate tangible and lasting impact. This mission is pursued most prominently through the integration of sustainability and responsibility in education, and in the way the school operates as well as the governance and culture it promotes. In other areas, the School’s sustainability strategy focuses more on supporting and fostering bottom-up initiatives.  

These efforts are coordinated by the Sustainable Development Initiative (SDI), a school-wide initiative set up in 2018, that brings together faculty members, staff, and students to support individual initiatives, catalyze change, and foster synergies. At the core of the SDI’s action is the conviction that the School’s societal impact depends both on what it does—education, research, and service to society—and on how it does it. The “how” amplifies the impact of the “what”, shaped by the governance and culture that ULB and SBS-EM strive to foster, as well as by the School’s unique context: its location in Brussels, the capital of Europe and Belgium, set within a socio-economically and ethnically diverse urban environment that is reflected in its student body.  

Learn more about our four action areas in support of our sustainability strategy:  

                   
Updated on May 27, 2026