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Problem-Based Learning (PBL), a student-centred learning approach that focuses on reallife problems in higher education, has been around for more than fifty years (Servant-Miklos, Schmidt & Norman, 2019).It originated in 1969 at McMaster University's medical school in Canada and spread to other academic disciplines including engineering (Guerra et al., 2017), law (Cleassens, 2020), humanities (Kloeg, 2023), and psychology (Wiggins et al., 2016), becoming a well-recognized approach in universities worldwide.This wide-ranging diversity of applications has yielded, on the one hand, a rich body of theory and practice, with different PBL models emerging to meet diverging curricular requirements and learning objectives (Savin-Baden, 2003).On the other hand, it has also created some confusion, wherein the differences in philosophical understanding, didactic basis, and concrete practice between the academic disciplines have not been discussed thoroughly.At the same time, PBL is facing a host of new challenges from emerging global threats and opportunities, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, socioeconomic inequality, and technological progress, including artificial intelligence, with a commensurate rise in ethical challenges.Faced with the rapidly evolving environmental emergency, some PBL scholars have recently called for PBL to "change or risk irrelevance" (Servant-Miklos, Dolmans & Ryberg, 2023), advocating for the development of more socially engaged, transdisciplinary, and sustainable approaches to PBL.