Room T-7 tucked inside the Major Groups/Side Events Pavilion of the RioCentro convention hall isn’t an obvious place for journalists to sniff out news at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, but Iranian activist Maryam Safari was waiting there eagerly on Tuesday afternoon.

Her class “Capacity Development for Environmental Fiscal Reform” was to begin at 3 pm. The instructor would be Nitin Desai, the Indian economist who served as the No 2 official at the UN’s first Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and 10 years later led the Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development.

It was one in a 10-lesson course (June 13-22) known as SD-Learning, intended to increase participants’ understanding of, and ability to engage in, crucial areas of sustainable development.

“One of the problems for not having sustainable development is we don’t have a green economy and we need to have environmental fiscal reform to find a solution,” said Safari, who heads the international department of the Charitable Institute for Protecting Social Victims, a nongovernmental organization in Iran.

“Here is the place we can exchange experience, talk about it and get new ideas and pass the experiences on to our country and our region,” she said.

Safari wasn’t the only person anticipating Tuesday’s class. Takahiro Nakaguchi, director of the Coalition of Local Governments for Environmental Initiative, a UN-recognized NGO in Japan, expressed interest in environmental courses. “Japan is doing a good job in waste reduction, but it is not very good in natural conservation,” he said.

A day earlier, John Mark Mwanika from Uganda was sitting in the same makeshift classroom waiting for the session “Sustainable Management of Natural Resources to Support Post-Conflict Peace-Building” to start. It would be his second SD Learning class after a favorable experience with his first, last Friday, on “One Planet Living: A Practical Framework for Achieving Sustainable Consumption and Production”.

“The first one was very practical and useful for me,” said Mwanika, a project coordinator for the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union in Kampala, Uganda’s. “In order to use ‘One Planet Living’ principles, there are certain steps you have to go through, steps you will use to analyze your activities and see whether they’re friendly to the environment.”

But he was especially interested in the post-conflict peace-building class, given his country’s ongoing effort to heal from intermittent civil strife over the past three decades. Mwanika said he planned to attend more classes.

Zhou Mo, originally from China’s Guangdong province and now a researcher at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, was among dozens of people sitting in Room T-7 on Sunday morning for a class on “Policy Making for Renewable Energy,” given by experts from the International Renewable Energy Agency.

“The things I am looking forward to include what factors are considered in policy making and what other factors we should put into our model,” said Zhou, who explained that she’s working to develop ways to advise government policy makers about energy-efficiency standards.

Nicolas Fichaux, a speaker from the agency, said the class was meant to raise awareness about renewable energy. “What’s interesting for us is to have this very interactive format and raise points that are really important” for participants, he said afterward.

Nikhil Seth, head of sustainable development in the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which organizes the SD Learning course, said that awareness of sustainable development is still low. The course, he said, is intended to gather information from instructors and participants about experiences and best practices around the world, then present these to policy makers who can make decisions based on what works.

“Our ability to share that information is really at the heart of sustainable development,” Seth said.

He pointed to the first class of the course, “Social and Environment Protection: The Brazilian Experience,” which focused on the South American country’s Bolsa Familia (Portuguese for Family Allowance) government social-welfare program.

“It has played a big role in reducing poverty in Brazil, so many countries can learn from the Brazilian experience.”

Contact the writer at chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn