The Declaration of Saltillo is an outcome of the 1st World Encounter on Sustainable Actions: Educating Resilient Societies held in the City of Saltillo on November 24th in 2015, in partnership with the ESD Expert Network & ENGAGEMENT GLOBAL. It is now the city’s main educational instrument used to spread ESD in Institutions of Higher Education. It captures the key inputs of national and international experts on Education for Sustainable Development and young participants interested in promoting sustainability and learning from shared best-practices. Consisting in 10 key points, it is now being spread in the form of a visual declaration that outlines the role of education within UNESCO's Global Action Programme (GAP).

The World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development, held in the year of 2009, defined ESD as "an approach to teaching and learning based on the ideals and principles that underlie sustainability". After the DESD ended in 2014, UNESCO endorsed the new Global Action Programme to continue the efforts on the matter. The GAP seeks to "generate and scale up action in all levels and areas of education and learning to accelerate progress towards sustainable development". It has identified five priority action areas that encompass advancing policy; transforming learning and training environments; building capacities of educators and trainers; empowering and mobilizing youth; and accelerating sustainable solutions at the local level. The ESD Expert Network, through its partners in Mexico, works to support and provide the means required by non-formal education strategies targeting learners, trainers, multipliers and change agents relevant to the sustainable development of the city. The Declaration of Saltillo has now consolidated as a policy initiative that focuses on ESD, citizenship education and the development of learning activities and landscapes that promote sustainability values and competences, with a strong focus on citizen and community participation. ESD is a broad field of action, with a rich variety of methodological and practical approaches. In the case of the city, transformational learning and leadership are considered key. Not only information is shared, but interactive and reflexive activities are planned based on overall objectives, desired attitudes, learning landscapes provided by the city´s ecosystems, as well as outcome objetives and action learning ('sustainability in action' approach). We support the ESD Expert Network approach to key ESD competences, since information is not enough to trigger action. These competences and approaches are reflected in the Declaration of Saltillo. Our main strategy has been mapping the possibilities of concrete action in order to share them with the target individuals/groups and use feedback to find new options or aspects that weren´t considered while designing the strategy.

Educators and change agents seldom receive any training on sustainability concepts, pedagogical strategies, ESD and SD agendas, such as the new Sustainable Development Objetives, so are very unaware of where we are trying to head towards as both, a local and a global community. We are now working to develop a training manual based on constructivist learning and action research. The initiative's focal point, as a member of the ESD EXpert Network is currently working in the update of and innovative new additions to an ESD Training of Trainers Manual, with the support of the German Government Agency ENGAGEMENT GLOBAL and a team of experts from Mexico, India, South Africa and Germany. This manual is intended to provided state-of-the-art training concepts, resources and methodologies to key actors in education institutions and organizations, hence improving their sustainability competences and contributing to local and national capacity building.The Saltillo Declaration will be used as the overarching framework of reference for action within the Mexican publication. Hereby I provide a link to the first international training manual elaborated by the ESD Expert Network: http://esd-expert.net/beta/files/2012/09/ESD-ToT-international.pdf

In the midst of the 10th International Meeting of the Expert Network of Education for Sustainable Development between the country partners of Germany, India, Mexico and South Africa, the City of Saltillo welcomed guests, partners and attendees to open up to a creative and inspiring gathering on the future of Education for Sustainable Development. The 1st World Encounter on Sustainable Actions: Educating Resilient Societies, brought together almost 800 people from universities, city governments, research institutes, opinion leaders and the general public among other key stakeholders, to exchange best practices and ideas about how the resilience of the world's socio-ecological systems can be built in the 21st century. The Saltillo Declaration is the result of this event. The City of Saltillo hosts a -mainly- urban population that accounts for 98% of the total amount of inhabitants. Hence, urban focused educational strategies are considered paramount. Previous to the Encounter, the city's Environment Office together with the contact person in Saltillo from the ESD Expert Network, built a multistakeholder structure consisting in education institutions and organizations who participated during the event and that now collaborate by hosting learning sessions where multiple themes related to the Saltillo Declaration are explored. With the support of the ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) Expert Network, an international body of experts committed to embedding ESD systematically in all areas of formal and non-formal education, co-organized the event. The Network is a key partner of UNESCO in the implementation of the Global Action Programme on ESD. With the support of this Network, we seek to promote the Declaration of Saltillo as a national ESD document of reference and in the international stage via our partners, specially since we now face a lack of a national policy on ESD as well as on Environmental Education. Moreover, the Network's Expert support partners in order to ellaborate learning materials and joint projects at the international scale.

City of Saltillo (State of Coahuila in Mexico) & the City's Multistakeholder Network of Higher Education Institutions (Tec de Monterrey, Universidad Carolina, ULSA, UAdeC, Tec de Saltillo, etc.); Engagement Global (German Federal Government Agency financed by the BMZ); ESD Expert Network (International Network of Experts with Partners from Germany, India, Mexico and South Africa promoting Education for Sustainable Development) a UNESCO key Partner in promoting youth empowerment within the frame of the new Global Action Programme 2015-2020.