Every year, Japanese universities meet at the Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD) Forum to promote Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The HESD Forum is the biggest meeting in Japan of its kind. 30 participants from HESD member universities attended the Forum at Ritsumeikan University, Japan, on the Shiga Campus.

RCE Thiruvananthapuram together with its major stakeholder the Centre for Innovation in Science and Social Action (CISSA) has won the Global Prize of the Education in Sustainable Development (ESD) Okayama Award for 2017 for the project 'Kerala Children’s Agricultural Science Congress'. The project was selected for the Award from among 11 nominated projects in the first-round of selection. As many as 44 applications from 29 countries competed for the Award.

This ProSPER.Net project was led by TERI University, as a collaboration between the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), and Tongji University. It showed a detailed assessment of the policy and regulatory interventions, more specifically, the fiscal and financial instruments shaping the development of decentralised energy systems in China, India, and Thailand.