Ranking our future: University students' prioritization of Sustainable Development Goals and their connection to nature

Abstract Universities are important places to promote the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), because today's students are tomorrow's professionals, who may make important decisions that will impact sustainable development. Given the need for future collaboration across disciplines to achieve the SDGs, we analyzed if there are differences between study programs in how important they perceive each SDG to be and, with a focus on environmental sustainability, how connected they are to nature. An online questionnaire was used to survey students from 18 different programs ( n = 1920). We found that: (1) there were significant differences in connection to nature between programs, as well as in how important they rated each SDG, except SDG2; (2) while individual SDGs were more important to some programs than others, there was a general consensus among university students in Germany about which goals are more important to them: SDG2 and SDG6 were perceived as particularly important, in contrast to SDG8, SDG9, SDG10, and SDG17; (3) SDG15 correlated with connection to nature, therefore strengthening students' connection to nature through environmental education could be an effective way to help achieve SDG15; (4) as students generally gave medium to high importance to the ideas of the SDGs, universities should be encouraged to use this as a gateway to increase education on sustainable development and integrate it into all programs.