As UNESCO indicates ""The Decade of the United Nations for the education with a view to the sustainable development tries to promote the education as foundation of a more viable society for the humanity and to integrate the sustainable development in the system of school education to all the levels”. In essence it proposes to stimulate a solidarity education that contributes to a correct perception of the world state, generate attitudes and responsible behaviors and preparefor the decision making towards the achievement of a cultural plural and physically sustainable development. This way the UPC has developed in its new study plan of studies, a system of generic competitions solved in seven levels: entrepreneur and innovation, sustainability and social understanding, third language, efficient oral and writing communication, team work, solvent use of the resources of information, autonomous learning. With this, as a base of investigation, a group of indicators where developed under the EMAS Project umbrella; that would give the university a system to assess the educational processes that promote the competition in SUSTAINABILITY AND SOCIAL COMMITMENT. Nevertheless, as sustainability is not based on a linear definition, but on the comprehension of the interconnections between the different aspects that it concerns, the indicators needed to give answer from different dimensions. That is to say, it where developed a range of indicators that concerned the different degrees of conscience and knowledge that can be acquired during an educational process. These, took into account on one hand the conceptual knowledge acquired and on the other, the personal values, attitudes, behaviors developed during an educational process and finally the coherence the students had between them at the end of the course. Having the previous in account there where developed 5 different indicators (Sustainability Credits Implication, Sustainability Students Internalizing, Professional Activity, Sustainability Investigation Implication, Sustainability Promotion and Diffusion Activities) which evaluate different scopes of the education for the sustainability from the school. The development of this Project has been framed under the rules of the utility, practicality, extension possibilities and continuity at the university. Also it has taken into account the different methodologies for obtaining the data needed for the indicators. Until now the results are being of satisfaction because of the easy -way of use in the different campus of the university and schools but also by the easy way of interpretation and understanding.

This article is concerned with soil-sustainability problems of agriculture in developing countries, in particular with soil erosion. The aim of our study is to develop a comprehensive model that explains the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices with respect to soil conservation. Our approach includes the following special features: (A) The model is comprehensive in that it includes a large number of institutional, personal–social, economic, and physical explanatory variables. (B) Particular attention is paid to the influence of marketing systems on the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices, which to our knowledge has been neglected in past research. (C) The concept of adopting sustainable agricultural practices (ASAP) is differentiated into a limited number of basic components of soil conservation.(D) The model is estimated by Principal Component Regression, which enhances efficient estimation of the impact of many explanatory variables on ASAP. Our model is applied to Cabuyal hillside farming in Colombia. The application demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed model. ASAP is differentiated into three basic components: soil-disturbance control, soil-protection practices, and run-off control. It appears that soil-disturbance control is particularly influenced by farmers’ characteristics, such as education and managerial variables. The second component, soil-protection practices, appears to be strongly influenced not only by farmers’ managerial variables but also by their relationship with their environment, in particular marketing institutions. The third soil-conservation component, run-off control, is influenced by the physical characteristics of the plot and by the available farm labor. Our empirical results demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed model in designing agricultural policies, because it can determine which variables are more likely to influence the adoption of a specific type of soil conservation.