Climate Literacy: Navigating Climate Change Conversations

This free online course from the University of British Columbiaintroduces the basics of the Earth’s climate system, climate models and predictions, the natural and human impacts of climate change, potential responses, and the evolution of climate policy.

You will learn how to:

§  Analyze the science behind climate change

§  Assess the demographic, economic and political factors that accelerate climate change

§  Evaluate mitigation strategies that address the causes of climate change

§  Explain key adaptation strategies that help us respond to climate change

§  Investigate the links between climate change and economic resilience, health, poverty, and environmental problems such as biodiversity and water quality

Course instructors

§  Dr. Sara Harris, Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences, UBC

DDr. Sarah Burch, Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability, UBC

Register for free at Coursera:www.coursera.org/course/climateliteracy

View the course introduction on YouTube (2:06).

About this course

 Climate Literacy is delivered as a MOOC – Massive Open Online Course – through Coursera and is sponsored by UBC Continuing Studies Centre for Sustainability at the University of British Columbia.

Learn with others worldwide. Starts May 20, 2013.

The Global Climate Adaptation Partnership (GCAP), working with the University of Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, is excited to offer the 2013 Adaptation Academy Foundation Course: Creating Climate Adaptation Leaders aiming to support decision making in a changing environment.

Now in our fourth year, the Adaptation Academy is a leading climate adaptation training programme, supporting participants in developing technical and leadership skills in climate adaptation through actual project work and practical case studies. We constantly refine and shape the course based on the learning and feedback from previous years, ensuring that we remain a global leader in climate adaptation training. 

Climate adaptation requires champions, leaders and agents of change. Join us next August and immerse yourself in the Foundation Course. Emerge transformed. Be prepared to find adaptation solutions for some of the most profound challenges ever to face the world and build a strong foundation for integrating climate adaptation into your work. Join world-renowned alumni and the leading global network of climate adaptation.

From the halls of an Oxford college, explore your role, make new and binding friendships with future leaders, raise the bar on your own thinking and potential by rubbing shoulders with an internationally renowned academic community, learn first-hand from expert practitioners and be inspired by leading intellectuals pioneering revolutionary interventions.

The Foundation Course integrates four central learning themes:

1.      Participants’ role as change makers

2.      Causal chains of climate science

3.      Adaptation as a process

4.      Project/Program development

Building on these four central themes, we have developed a range of different modules and exercises to bridge knowledge and application, theory and practice. The content of the 2013 Foundation Course will be:

·Concepts of climate change, risk, vulnerability and adaptation

·Analysing climate data for change and variability – trends and extreme events

·Using climate change scenarios – uncertainty, probability, climate envelopes

·Theory of change, leadership skills and communicating climate risks

·Assessing vulnerability and impacts

·Mapping socio-institutional networks, information flows and needs

·National, sectoral, urban and local strategies and measures

·Disaster risk reduction

·Economics of adaptation and adaptation finance

·Screening adaptation options to develop sound projects

·Monitoring, evaluation and learning in adaptation pathways

·Project development and practical skills development

Places are filling up and only a few remain! Don’t miss this exciting opportunity to revolutionise your thinking and take steps towards becoming an effective change maker.

The 2013 Adaptation Academy Foundation Course runs from the 12-30 August 2013, Oxford UK.

For more information, check out the Academy website (www.adaptationacademy.org) or contact Mica Longanecker, the Academy Coordinator, at academy@climateadaptation.cc.

Apply directly online for the course here!

The Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Massachusetts is offering two intensive 6-week, 3-credit online courses on climate change this summer. The courses are open to master’s students as well as upper-level undergrads from any institution. They are appropriate for students in Environmental Studies, Sustainability Studies, Regional Planning, and City/Urban Planning and for environmental and planning professionals.

• Planning for Local Climate Change Mitigation, May 26-June 28
• Planning for Local Climate Change Adaptation, July 8-August 16

Details 

Registration info

Flyer

Jeff Howard, Ph.D.
Visiting Scholar, Environmental Studies, NYU
Visiting Instructor, Regional Planning, UMass-Amherst

jeffhoward@admin.umass.edu

817-999-6208
web page

The Importance of Place in Climate Change Education

Thursday, April 25, 2013
7:30 – 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time (EDT)
Presenter: Kristen Iverson Poppleton
Place is an important tool when teaching climate change, and connecting the two makes the climate change immediately relevant and personal. Kristen will speak broadly on place-based education and climate change.  She will provide specific examples of how the Will Steger Foundation connects Minnesota educators and their students with Minnesota as their place, makes them aware of how climate change is impacting them, and helps them develop ways they can implement solutions in their schools and communities. 

For free registration for this or other upcoming webinars, visit  http://greenteacher.com/webinars.html.

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(This will be our third climate change webinar for youth educators.   The archived version of the following two previous ones remain VERY popular with Green Teacher subscribers:

“Deep Climate Change Education: Learning and Teaching for Personal and Social Transformation”  
Presenters: David Selby and Fumiyo Kagawa    Suitability: All formal and non-formal youth educators

“Energy Education: How & Why?”
Presenter: Pat Higby      Suitability: Formal and non-formal educators, grades 2-12

(You can learn more about both of these webinars on our website via the above link.)
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Educators, especially at the college and high school level, should check out the resources available at 100 Views of Climate Change, a site developed by Colorado State University. The site includes 100s of videos, book suggestions, website links, and suggestions for how society and individuals can address climate change.

There’s an excellent piece in today’s edition of Inside Climate News today about new national science standards (http://www.nextgenscience.org) that will make the teaching of global warming part of the public school curriculum in the United States.

The Harvard Extension School is offering an online course on climate change that starts on Wednesday, 30 January at 4:30pm.  It is entitled:

Global Climate Change: The Science, Social Impact, and Diplomacy of a World Environmental Crisis

This 15-week,  semester-long course may be taken for credit on an undergraduate or graduate school level, but it can also be taken with a “Not for Credit” option. Many citizens, fellow scholars, and environmentalists working in government or NGOs throughout this country and around the world have found these courses to be of great value as a source of strategic information and analytical insight as they try to address environmental problems in their own careers and workplaces.  From this perspective many active professionals engaged in the everyday work place — whether as businessmen, government officials, college or university professors, NGO and environmental activits — have found this course of exceptional value in the past. It has helped them orient themselves toward the largest shared experience before the human community in the coming decades, and it has given them the tools to take forward in their own lives to continue to make sense of the changes in our climate and help them formulate realistic and effective responses to it in their own lives.

Anyone enrolled in the course is given access to and instruction in using the “Clearing House for Environmental Course Materials” which can serve to support their ongoing work well after the completion of the individual courses.  Further, students in these courses will receive information about Food-Matters.TV where they can explore the emerging impact of climate change upon both local and global food systems and the ways in which this will express itself in the coming years as an environmental justice issue.

In addition the course is designed to exposed students to a variety of “outside” experts and opinion-leaders as a component of the weekly lectures.  For example, in the second week of the Climate course, students will be able to view (or attend if they are on campus) a presentation by former Vice-President, Al Gore, reflecting upon our current global climate predicament and offering insights about how we might proceed from here.  Further, the course offers students a “window” to other climate-related events going on at Harvard throughout the forthcoming semester.  For instance, the day after Al Gore’s presentation to the Harvard community, there is going to be an important public discussion of climate change policy in the United States, touching upon why nothing of substance has been accomplished by a wide variety of political figures over the last quarter century.

The course starts on Wednesday, 30 January.  Syllabus for the course can be accessed by clicking here.  The initial meeting of the course from 4:30 onwards on 30 January 2013 is available in streaming mode by clicking here.

United Nations University–Institute for Sustainability and Peace (UNU-ISP) is pleased to announce a new postgraduate course on renewable energy.  The University Network for Climate and Ecosystems Change Adaptation Research (UN-CECAR) – for which UNU-ISP acts as the Secretariat – is a university network of leading universities in the Asia Pacific that developed the course for students to understand renewable energy issues in the context of science, technology, economics, policy, and relate renewable energy to climate change and other global contemporary issues.

The intensive course will cover hard topics such as small hydropower, solar, geothermal, bio-, wind, marine, fuel cell and hydrogen energy and soft topics such as energy demand and supply, economics, security, and policy.  Students will also receive practical training with RETScreen clean energy project analysis software and HOMER energy modeling software.  It is a unique postgraduate course with contributions from leading universities in the Asia Pacific.

The course will be held from the 25th February 2013 to 23rd March 2013 at UNU-ISP, Tokyo, Japan.   A limited number of partial fellowships are available for deserving candidates from developing countries.  Priority will be given to students who are currently enrolled in a postgraduate programme.   However, researchers, faculty/staff of universities, government officials, international agencies, and professionals in relevant professions are invited to apply on-line by 15 January 2013 at

http://cecar.unu.edu/apply

For more information, please visit our website at

http://cecar.unu.edu/re-course

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Ms. Soo Huey Teh (teh@unu.edu) or Mr. Felino Lanuevo (lanuevo@unu.edu)

Please feel free to forward this message to your colleagues, students, networks and community of practice.   Apologies for cross posting, if any.

Wishing you the very best for 2013 and happy holidays!

Sincerely,

Felino Lanuevo
Programme Associate
Climate and Ecosystems Change Adaptation Research (CECAR)
Institute for Sustainability and Peace (UNU-ISP)

United Nations University

5-53-70 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-8925, Japan
e-mail:  lanuevo@unu.edu
CECAR:  cecar.unu.edu

Teaching Environmental Justice: Interdisciplinary Approaches
April 14-16, 2013, Carleton College, Northfield, MN
Application deadline: January 21, 2013 (workshop is open to 30 participants by application)

Equitable distribution of risks and resources, long a discussion of interest to economists, ethicists and others, now requires an understanding of geoscience topics from natural hazards to ground water hydrology to mineral and energy resources. This workshop will explore how we bring together concepts from humanities, social science, and geoscience to further students’ understanding of environmental justice and foster their ability to act.   Workshop participants will gain a broad perspective on ways in which environmental justice is taught across the undergraduate curriculum and new ideas for integrating geoscience and environmental justice together in their teaching.  The workshop is for undergraduate faculty from all disciplines who are interested in a stronger integration of geoscience and other perspectives in teaching environmental justice.

Please forward this announcement to interested colleagues.
Contact Cathy Manduca (cmanduca at carleton.edu) with questions.

https://serc.carleton.edu/integrate/workshops/envirojustice2013/index.html