Learn how the programme works, get to know your classmates, set personal goals, discuss our AI policy, and explore how to apply the neuroscience of learning to your own educational journey.

TOPICS: Mental models and introduction to systems analysis, the implications of seeing climate change as a "super wicked problem," competing climate worldviews.

TOPICS: Earth’s energy balance and the greenhouse effect, the global carbon cycle, climate observations, data and models, climate scenarios and tipping points.

TOPICS: Introduction to economics and politics of climate change, climate policy instruments, climate justice, international climate governance, carbon markets, climate activism and lawsuits. Case studies include the Paris Agreement, the EU-ETS, the Ecuador people's movement to stop oil extraction, among others. 

SKILLS: Mapping stakeholder power and influence, assessing the strengths and limitations of climate policy instruments with a special focus on compliance carbon markets.

TOPICS: Global impacts and tipping points, local climate hazards and impacts, climate risk assessment, vulnerability and disasters, extreme event attribution, cascading and compound risks, climate risk data and decision-making, case study of climate impact on wheat production in India. 

SKILLS: Using foresight tools for decision-making under uncertainty, comparing and evaluating open-source tools for local climate risk assessment, communicating risk to support robust decision-making.

TOPICS: What counts as a climate "solution?," comparing and evaluating climate solutions and trade-offs.

SKILLS: Comparing climate solutions across different dimensions, using En-ROADS to evaluate climate solutions and trade-offs.

TOPICS: Technical fundamentals of energy, vocabulary and basic unit conversions, cleaning up the grid, electrify everything, energy markets and regulation, hard-to-abate sectors, energy justice, clean energy innovation, theory and design of clean energy policy, detailed case studies of the energy transitions in California and India.

SKILLS: Analyzing energy systems transitions through basic technical, economic, and political lenses, communicating complex energy issues to diverse audiences, understanding country-specific energy transition strategies.

TOPICS: Understanding the food system through a systems lens, sustainable agriculture, regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, climate-resilient farming, livestock and food emissions, food security and nutrition, sustainable diets, agroecology (connecting conservation to food security and rural livelihoods), food systems policy and innovation. Deep dive into practical dimensions and technologies for scaling agroecology. 

SKILLS: Quantify climate impacts across food systems, apply systems thinking to food systems, identify high-impact intervention points, assess evidence and scalability of solutions, recognize interventions that deliver multiple benefits (climate, health, equity, and resilience).

TOPICS: Carbon dioxide removal (CDR), carbon capture and storage (CCS), direct air capture (DAC), biochar, enhanced rock weathering, solar radiation management (SRM). Nature-based Solutions (NbS): Forests, grasslands, soil carbon sequestration, peatlands, blue carbon ecosystems, carbon measurement and MRV, Indigenous stewardship and conservation, nature-positive development. Deep dive into finance for nature, including debt-for-nature swaps, voluntary carbon markets and REDD+, with case studies on forest restoration and wildfire insurance in California + an REDD+ initiative in Zimbabwe. 

SKILLS: Understanding the potential, limitations and risks of CDR, NbS and SRM in IPCC scenarios and global climate politics and negotiations, evaluating carbon removal technologies, assessing voluntary carbon market integrity for NbS and identifying best practices for offseting programmes. 

Pick one of the following tracks and complete a set of assignments that build to a project:

• Building a Corporate Sustainability Strategy
• Climate Action Planning for cities and communities 
• Renewable Energy Business and Finance
• Climate Communications
• Designing for Climate Impact in Tech and Engineering (software + hardware pathways)