Sustainable development is the central theme in the European Green Deal and in the Paris Agreement at Climate Change as well as in many other EU policy papers. Higher education has a special role to play in sustainable development, environmental protection and action against climate change. Despite this, higher education institutions are only mentioned twice in the 169 targets of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and individual contributions to the SDGs are even less evident. This disparity in relevance and visibility presents both a challenge and an opportunity:

• How can higher education become more prominent in the SDGs?
• How can university faculty, researchers, and other engaged staff become central to higher education's SDG efforts?
• What can individuals, institutions, communities and society gain by encouraging and valuing the current and future individual SDG contributions of higher education staff?
• How can this change be effectively and reliably supported?

SDG-iLevel (Leveraging Individual SDG contributions by University Staff) was a forward-looking project running from February 2022 to February 2025. It aimed to drive innovation and to achieve an enduring impact in three topical areas of higher education:

• sustainable development
• digital innovation
• mental well-being of higher education staff

The project created approaches, methods and tools aimed at uncovering, harnessing and strengthening the individual contributions of higher education staff to the SDGs in order to improve their mental well-being, job satisfaction, productivity and teamwork and promote further SDG contributions. The project addressed this question on several fronts by:

• developing a methodology,
• training university staff in the relevant skills,
• creating an effective online promotion tool,
• enabling behaviour change through nudging, and
• building institutional/departmental capacity.