The World Summit on Sustainable Development recommended to the United Nations General Assembly that “it consider adopting a Decade of Education for Sustainable Development starting in 2005”.
In December 2002, resolution 57/254 on the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development beginning 1 January 2005 was adopted by consensus.

Engineering education at all levels, especially higher education for the training of decision-makers, researchers and teachers, should be oriented towards sustainable development and foster environmentally aware attitudes, skills and behaviour patterns, as well as a sense of ethical responsibility.

Following the UNESCO strategies, three European Technological Universities deeply committed to ESD decided to take action by creating the Engineering Education in Sustainable Development Observatory (EESD-Observatory).
The main goal of the Observatory is to monitor the advances of the Barcelona Declaration worldwide. The Barcelona Declaration was settled in October 2004, at the 2nd International Conference on EESD.

The Declaration underlines the importance of Sustainable Development in all technological education, and to stimulate Higher Education Institutions in the engineering field to implement progressively their ESD objectives into concrete actions.

The main objectives of the Observatory is to report internationally the state of the art in EESD; to design, manage and assess a system for compilation, evaluation, storage and dissemination of knowledge on EESD.
The Observatory sets up a network with other partners (EFS, AGS, DHO, SEFI, SD-Promo, Feani, etc) and Institutions worldwide in order to exchange information, experience and follow common methodologies where applicable and minimise duplication of efforts; to be a platform of reporting best practices and case study in EESD and Research on EESD.