THE JOURNAL OF ASIA TEFL Vol. 17, No. 3, Fall 2020, 1085-1092 http://dx.doi.org/10.18823/asiatefl.2020.17.3.25.1085 1085 The Journal of Asia TEFL http://journal.asiatefl.org/ e-ISSN 2466-1511 © 2004 AsiaTEFL.org. All rights reserved. PBL and the New Ecological Paradigm: Fostering Environmental Awareness Through Project-Based Learning Alexander Nanni Mahidol University International College, Thailand Laird Allan Mahidol University International College, Thailand Introduction Sustainability is a major and growing concern worldwide. The topic has received significant media attention, and innumerable organizations have released sustainability goals. In 2015, the United Nations published the seventeen interrelated Sustainable Development Goals, that promote economic, social, and environmental sustainability (United Nations, n.d.). The Association of Southeast Asian Nations recently affirmed similar goals in a June 2019 statement (“ASEAN leaders’ vision statement,” 2019). The most broadly cited definition of sustainable development comes from the Brundtland Report, “Our Common Future,” which reads, “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland, 1987, p. 40). This is taken to incorporate two primary outcomes: firstly, that the needs of the world’s poor must be met (via either empowerment or measures to address income inequality) to ensure social stability and further development for all, and secondly, that there are limitations on resource availability driven by natural abundances and regenerative capacities on the one hand and by the technological capacity to extract and exploit the resource on the other (Brundtland, 1987). In Thailand, a founding member of ASEAN, the need for sustainability education is now recognized publicly, spurred on in particular by unabashed concern about air pollution. Air pollution-induced mortality is now well over 30,000 per annum (out of about 550,000 deaths per annum), placing it seventh overall and first among environmental causes (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, 2018). Issues like these trigger interest in sustainability and a pressure to incorporate it in curricula. Thailand has not been complacent about sustainability curricula, although explicitly incorporating them into EFL has not been emphasized. This report introduces a project designed in response to this need to introduce students to sustainability and explores the impact of this project on students’ environmental worldview. The project was implemented in an intensive English for academic purposes (EAP) course at a university in Thailand. This 10-week course prepares students to enter an English-medium bachelor’s degree program. The main goals of the program are to develop language proficiency; however, this is accomplished through engagement with meaningful real-world content. This could be classified as the weak form of “Content and Language Integrated Learning” (CLIL), which has the goal of helping “learners develop their target