​Smart Campus Cloud Network ( sccnhub.com) is not just a digital network of students and faculty of higher educational institutes ( HEIs) but a key driver for change and tool to attain SDGs.

TERRE, through its facilitative and catalytic role, allows the students and faculty to prioritize and select the SDGs to launch in their campus for implementation. TERRE encourages to make the institute and its campus become a laboratory of SDGs. More than that TERRE stresses to monitor the progress according to the targets and indices, adopted for campuses. Learning by doing and accelerating by sharing are the two key principles deployed in the SCCN. Students are encouraged to engage in sharing the successes and failures in their pursuit of localising the United Nations SDGs in their campuses,

It is a bottom-up approach to attain the SDGs. The Government of India has kept the localisation of SDGs at the core of its SDGs-implementation strategy. State governments, local city/town/village level governments play pivotal roles in designing, executing and monitoring the activities. Under SCCN localisation is at the campus level and decision making by the universities is based on the recommendation of a core group of students and faculty, ( visit the toolkit and jump-start guide in sccnhub.com ).

Nearly 250 higher educational institutes have prioritized clean energy and climate change -SDG 7 and SDG 13 respectively. They have taken a pledge for carbon neutrality which is termed as ' Not Zero-Net Zero'. Initiated by SCCN in collaboration with AICTE and UNESCO the universities have rightly considered that action on carbon neutrality is the right first step in localising SDGs.

Rajendra Shende

Chairman, TERRE Policy Centre

Former Director, UNEP