**5. Discussion and Conclusions**

The review of existing teaching of SUD describes the changing relationship between universities and wider society, and how ESD graduates need to have a set of core competencies that will enable them to drive sustainable change. It also discusses the importance of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teaching of SUD, and the critical need to students to experience critical reflection and transformative learning. However, as noted in the review, such teaching is difficult to integrate into existing degree programs, and many programs are focused on integrating sustainability into existing degree programs rather than in pedagogical frameworks developed for ESD. The Tampere SUD program has been developed in response to this need, incorporating interdisciplinary teaching and learning from the ground-up, with a pedagogical framework based on available information on best practice in ESD.

This paper promotes a new line of thinking in educating future professionals on sustainable development issues. It provides a description of the theoretical framework for ESD curricula to address SUD and subsequent development of the Tampere SUD program. It addresses one of the key challenges of sustainable development for HEI teaching at the moment: How to educate professionals able of addressing economic, environmental, and social aspects of sustainability in the living environments and global scales, and capable of developing viable, inclusive, and equitable solutions that promote sustainable development respectively?

Our paper contributes to ESD curricula by synthesizing extant literature on education and learning of SUD. It reviews competencies required to tackle wicked problems in SUD and different pedagogic practices to achieve these competences in an inter- and transdisciplinary teaching program. The synthesis provides a structured overview of relevant perspectives to be considered and approaches to be used in developing SUD education. It applies the synthesis of competences and pedagogical practices in SUD education to describe and analyze a new Tampere SUD Bachelor degree program, contributing a practical understanding of how to apply ESD curricula to educate future experts on sustainable urban development issues. The program aims to provide students with the holistic knowledge necessary to consider development problems from multiple perspectives in addition to providing them with discipline-specific fundamental skills.

Both the literature-based synthesis and the case study provide useful insights for scholars developing more nuanced understanding of SUD education and for HEI actors developing SUD education initiatives in practice. While the literature review revealed that most of the existing SUD education initiatives include individual SUD courses, add-on elements to existing programs and master's level programs, the Tampere SUD is an example of a bachelor level program constructed especially to equip future SUD professionals with the skills and transdisciplinary understanding to enact sustainable change in a global context. The planning of Tampere SUD program and first implementation provide an understanding of how SUD educational approaches can be applied in practice at university degree programs.

The Tampere SUD program is relatively new, and further research and evaluation is necessary to determine how students are achieving the program objectives for core competencies, interdisciplinary thinking, and transformative and critical thought. There will be opportunities to refine the degree program in coming years using student feedback and assessments of the achievements of competence objectives. All this will provide practical knowledge on how to restructure ESD curricula to support learning of sustainable urban development also in other HEIs and how research should be developed to support this process.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, A.L., J.R., P.J., and L.H.; writing—original draft preparation, J.T., S.J., and M.L.; writing—review and editing, J.T., S.J., M.L., A.L., J.R., and P.J.; funding acquisition, A.L., L.H., and P.J. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from students to quote their written text and share their reflections on the degree programme.

**Data Availability Statement:** Data is contained within the article.

**Acknowledgments:** The Tampere University SUD program has been developed during a lengthy process involving several people in addition to the authors of article. The authors want to acknowledge the valuable contribution of several faculty members, students, and external stakeholders at various stages of program development. The authors would also like to acknowledge the contributions of the SUD students in providing their reflections on SUD and the degree program.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
