The need to build the concept of environment within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals

In the initial training of prospective environmental educators, sustainability must be understood from a systemic and complex perspective. Teaching experience shows that it is unfeasible to advance in such conceptions as Sustainability without first constructing basic concepts such as Environment. There is thus a need to take time in building this concept so that educators can access the concept of Sustainability, and hence the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). An educational process with this in mind has been developed over 11 years as part of the Andalusian Interuniversity Master's Degree in Environmental Education. The present work examines to what extent SDGs are present in the prospective environmental teachers' conceptions about the Environment, and how this varies over the course of the process. The results show that the SDGs are indeed present in these conceptions at both the beginning and the end of the process, although there is an increase in their richness and representativeness at the end. With regard to the areas of sustainable, natural, social, and economic development and their combinations (natural/social, natural/economic, and economic/social), the greatest increases at the end correspond to the SDGs comprising the economic area in combination with the social and the natural.