Malcolm Adiseshiah
From 1 to 16 November 1945 a United Nations Conference was convened in London for the establishment of an educational and cultural organization (ECO/CONF). In the conference, a new organization was created to establish the “intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind” and thus prevent the outbreak of another world war. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was founded by thirty-seven countries. Its Constitution to promote collaboration between member states in the fields of education, science and culture was signed on 16 November 1945 and came into force on 4 November 1946. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, former President of India, was a former student of Adiseshiah’s father. He made a referral to Sir Julian Huxley, then Director-General of UNESCO, who invited Adiseshiah to the organization in 1948. He was posted as Deputy Director of the department of exchange of persons. In that capacity Adiseshiah signed the UNESCO Fellowship letter in 1949 to M. S. Swaminathan, eminent scientist and administrator, to pursue research at the Agricultural University in Wageningen, the Netherlands which was the starting point of his illustrious career.
Environmental adult education
The United States was one of the first countries to officially recognize environmental education. During a joint House–Senate session in 1968, Congress acknowledged the importance of environmental education, and in 1970 passed the Environmental Education Act, which established the Office of Environmental Education. In 1992, this framework began to emerge in Asia and Latin America, where it is considered a stream of adult education and sometimes referred to as environmental popular education. The United Nations, for its part, began integrating the concept of environmental sustainability to the Education for All initiative, which is a set of UN policies with a goal of meeting learning needs of all people, as well as the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs). Specifically, the UN-organized Earth Summit in 1992, prompted the International Council for Adult Education to develop the Learning for Environmental Action Programme (LEAP) which took the initiative of facilitating the dialogue that connect environmental issues and adult learning.According to the UNESCO Web site, in 1968 it organized the first intergovernmental conference aimed at reconciling the environment and development, now known as "sustainable development". In the following years, UNESCO and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) initiated three major declarations that defined environmental education. Those included: