Canadian Psychology / Psychologie canadienne, Vol 66(4), Nov 2025, 285-295; doi:10.1037/cap0000428
The 17 global goals of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a call to action for governments and organizations around the world to work towards a sustainable future for all people and the planet. Human behaviour is directly or indirectly tied to all of the SDGs; therefore, psychology as a discipline is critical to their achievement. In this article, we—a team of 12 psychology educators from eight countries (three from the Global South) representing six continents—outline connections between psychology and the SDGs. We argue that psychology education at the foundational undergraduate level should integrate the SDGs into curricula. We describe the framework of psychological literacy that we believe is central to a strong undergraduate education in psychology and outline its conceptual relationship to the SDGs. We then describe the International Competences for Undergraduate Psychology, which explicitly mention the SDGs, but are also closely linked to them across all seven International Competences for Undergraduate Psychology competence categories (psychological knowledge, psychological research methodologies and methods, and the five psychology-relevant areas: values and ethics; cultural responsiveness and diversity; critical thinking and problem-solving; communication and interpersonal skills; and personal and professional development). Finally, psychology educators from six countries (Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Cameroon, India, and the United States) describe teaching and assessment strategies that harness both the International Competences for Undergraduate Psychology and the SDGs. These strategies offer examples to spur psychology educators to consider how they might make these connections in their own classes and curricula and in their own culture and context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)