Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) refers to an interdisciplinary approach to integrating societal, economic, and environmental issues into the curriculum. While ESD tends to be associated with the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the extent to which it should be incorporated in the veterinary education curriculum is debatable, especially for a professionally regulated programme. This emerging idea study used an anonymous survey to evaluate higher education academics across various disciplines’ perspectives and academic practices around ESD. Findings indicate academics have a diverse perception of what ESD means. While these perceptions include ESD within the scope of the 17 SDGs, academics also understood ESD within the scope of staff professional development and student life-long skill acquisition. It was observed that academics’ confidence in including ESD into their teaching practices (P = 0.021), academics’ level of training on ESD (P = 0.023), and academics’ views on the need for their institution’s commitment towards ESD (P = 0.028), were each statistically linked with academic’s number of teaching years in higher education. Results suggest that early career academics (with less than 5 years of teaching experience in higher education) were more aware and open to ESD, while academics with more than 5 years of experience were likely to be less interested in incorporating ESD into their teaching practices. This study revealed that although academics have some understanding of ESD, a clear institutional commitment to staff training on how to incorporate ESD into teaching and learning, particularly within the scope of the 17 SDGs will be crucial to the ESD initiative, however conversations around the “extent of incorporation” should be actively ongoing especially in veterinary schools.