Professor Wolfgang Lutz started life with a negative experience at primary school, but today he is one of the world’s leading advocates for education as a catalyst for positive change. His research shows why education is critical to global sustainable development, particularly as we urgently grapple with the consequences of climate change.

Early on, Wolfgang found that most models of sustainable development are incomplete because they don’t include education — partly because of a lack of reliable data on human capital. By bringing his population research together with climatologists, he has helped to reshape how we forecast the future and predict the impact of climate change. And he’s proven that education is the single most important factor in reducing environmental risks.

The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) he developed with a team at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, which combine climate-change scenarios with different socioeconomic futures, are used by politicians around the world today to inform decisions about climate, education, and investment.

What was your experience of school and education?

I really didn’t like education because of my experience at primary school. We had to sit still with our hands flat on the table and we were punished with a stick for misbehaving. The transition to that, from playful kindergarten, was the toughest of my life. I went to a much better secondary school and, at 16, I finally felt the wind beneath my wings. I was the editor of our student newsletter and the first article I published was called "Primary education: A crime on children" because I hated primary school so much. I mention it because my learning since then has been based entirely on scientific insights, evidence, and data rather than a vague concept of ‘education’. 

When did you get interested in researching population?

Early on in secondary school I became fascinated with future challenges, particularly population dynamics, after reading The Limits to Growth in 1972. It talked about the first computer-based mathematical model of the world's future, and it looked at energy supply, population growth, pollution, and food security. I decided that demography, which is the mathematics of populations and people, was the right place for me to start. Then it took me another 20 years to discover that education was so important to population modeling.

What was your most significant discovery?

I was testing scientific modeling at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), one of the world’s leading centers for the study of climate change, biodiversity, and water. I was trying to structure the human population not only by age and sex but by other measures. One of the things I tested was educational attainment.

It turned out that, if education was in the models, it was the single most important factor for positive developments. That surprised me.

And I’ve been researching it since.

Now, if you go to the Wittgenstein Centre homepage, you’ll find the educational attainment distribution since 1950, by age and gender, for every country in the world. So you can estimate the quantitative and economic benefits of education for health, quality of governance, and resilience to climate change, as well as economic growth. 

What do population studies tell us about economic growth and social change?

We can demonstrate that when better-educated groups reach working age, we see the most rapid economic growth.

How? Demography is the mathematical study of changing population size and composition. It has evolved from focusing on population size in the 1960s and 70s to examining age structures. At IIASA, we broadened the thinking further and started tracking educational attainment and labor-force participation. Our multi-dimensional demographic models mean we can forecast these multiple population characteristics decades into the future.

For example, if we know how many 20-year-old women have completed secondary education today, we can predict how many 60-year-old women with secondary education there will be in 40 years’ time, adjusting for mortality and migration. This is a powerful predictor for understanding social and economic change, including the ‘demographic dividend' — the economic boost that happens when a larger proportion of the population is of working age and better educated.

Why is educating women and girls particularly important?

Beyond being a human right, educating women and girls has significant macroeconomic and demographic impacts.

Research shows that a mother's education matters more for a child's survival than income or wealth. We summarized this finding in an article called "When it comes to survival, mind matters more than money" — what's in your brain has more impact than what's in your pocket.

There is ample evidence that female education is a key determinant of birth rates because women with higher educational attainments typically want fewer children and a better future for them. There’s also empirical evidence that it’s the women who have the biggest influence on family nutrition and health. Women are often more deeply involved in early childhood development, which is a critical time for a child’s cognitive and emotional growth. They are really shaping the future generation.

How does education improve our chances of surviving climate change?

Education is crucial for building resilience to climate change. My article with the sub-title, “Fund more educators rather than just engineers”, shows that scenarios with rapidly expanding education led to fewer disaster-related deaths compared to lower education scenarios. So while engineering projects (or ‘hard adaptation’) are important, investing in education (‘soft adaptation’) supports people to react to various challenges flexibly.

And we’re at the crunch point. The decisions we make right now really matter. The scenarios, or SSPs, show that improving our capabilities and education right now will have a big impact in the long run.

More educated people are more flexible. So they’re more likely to change their behavior to save energy by using public transport, for example. And they can pressure politicians to take action.

Through the Paris targets, we agreed to keep climate change below 1.5 degrees — but we’re at 1.5 degrees today. And the new Director General of IIASA, Hans Joachim Schellnuber predicts we’ll hit 2.7 or even three degrees, even if we deliver all the measures we’ve promised. And that, of course, will have dramatic consequences. 

What progress are we making with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?

Unfortunately, we’re behind on nearly all of the 17 SDGs and 169 specific targets. We’ll probably fail to reach them by 2030. But there’s a danger if we say we’re failing completely that people just sit back and think there’s nothing they can do. Of course, we have to show people the way forward.

We’re talking about extending the timeline to 2040. Or even developing new measures — former UN Secretary-General, Banh Ki-moon, appointed me as one of 15 experts writing The Future is Now report on global sustainable development. The report shows the SDGs are compartmentalized and sometimes contradictory. So we have to look at the big picture behind sustainable development in a comprehensive way. And there, again and again, education comes out as critical.

We published a report at IIASA last year called Systems Analysis for Sustainable Well-being. It focuses on the well-being of people within nature. And, in the longer term, this notion of sustainable well-being could show the way forward for global sustainability goals.

What are your closing thoughts?

We can't afford to wait — the decisions and investments we make now, particularly in education, will have significant impacts on our ability to address climate change, achieve sustainable development, and improve global well-being.