As stated on the recent Law 5/2023, educational actions that contribute to disseminate the reality and values of rural areas, including at all times a vision with gender perspective, will be promoted in the Valencian Community as well as the production of studies, reports and works which result of interest from a point of view of the demographic challenge, the depopulation and the cohesion of the territory. Thus, our research project aims to offer the rural communities a chance to create and evaluate a programme of healthy and sustainable lifestyles that put the Rural School at the centre of rural needs and interests.

Within the public administration framework, our results will offer City Councils, the Valencian Department of Education and Valencian Department of Environment, Water, Infrastructures and Territory (but also to the rural context of the Spanish territory), a detailed description of which the alternatives could be to promote, as a public policy, healthy and sustainable lifestyles since childhood, paying special attention to the rural areas (in compliance with the Organic Law of Education, as well as the national and regional legislation to fight against depopulation and climate change and improve the quality of life in the rural areas.

At the same time, we consider that the results could have a social, ecological and economic impact. Regarding the social aspect, focusing of the rural communities and their involvement on the diagnosis, implementation and evaluation stages of the healthy and sustainable programme, will generate cohesion between the agents of the education community. In the ecological aspect, it will give the Rural Schools the ability to create and strengthen opportunities to explore the rural environment in regards to the consolidation of healthy and sustainable lifestyles affecting life at schools, but also families. Finally, in the economic aspect, an impact in the effective decision-making based on evidence (for each of the four axis) is expected.

The project will also be sustainable over time because the people part of this consolidated group are teachers of the Faculty of Teacher Training. The empirical results, as well as the reflection sessions, will be transmitted to the training of the future Preschool and Primary Education teachers. The universities and, in particular, the Faculties of Teacher Training have the responsibility, through teaching, of training the next generation of teachers to understand the global challenges and the role that they could have to overcome these challenges.