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Discover climate course materials and resources.
Search the shared repository of simulations, case descriptions and course syllabi to enhance your own climate-related teaching.
- Resource
MIT OpenCourseWare is an online publication of materials from over 2,500 MIT courses, freely sharing knowledge with learners and educators around the world.
- Topics on: Technology
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Climate Literacy training to tackle the climate crisis and promote climate solutions
Are you concerned about the climate crisis? Are you concerned about how businesses and societies will be affected by the climate crisis and want to find out ways you could still mitigate the risks? Do you want to link the Covid-19-recovery with a transition to a low-carbon economy addressing social inequalities simultaneously?
The climate crisis is one of the greatest challenges we are currently facing, and it will affect all aspects of business and society and all other areas we might be concerned about such as economic recovery poverty or loss of biodiversity. Consequently, graduates and employees with the know-how in tackling environmental and social issues to cope with future challenges have a competitive advantage in the job market.
- Topics on: Planning
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Project Drawdown is the world’s leading resource for climate solutions.
Our mission is to help the world stop climate change—as quickly, safely, and equitably as possible.
To do this, we pursue three key strategies:
Advance Effective, Science-based Climate Solutions and Strategies. We do the science no one else does to cut through the noise and find effective “whole system” solutions and strategies for stopping climate change.
Foster Bold, New Climate Leadership. We inform, inspire, and empower business leaders, investors, and philanthropists to take bold, new positions, act more strategically, and rapidly bring climate solutions to scale.
Promote New Narratives and New Voices. We work to shift the conversation about climate change from “doom and gloom” to “possibility and opportunity.” And we elevate new, underrepresented climate heroes through storytelling and “passing the mic.”
- Topics on: Planning
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The Climate Fresk is a French nonprofit organization founded in December 2018 whose aim is to raise public awareness about climate change.
- Topics on: Planning
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Probable Futures is a non-profit climate literacy initiative that makes tools, stories, and resources available to everyone, everywhere.
Our climate handbook challenges assumptions and gives you clarity
- Topics on: Planning
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Our climate handbook challenges assumptions and gives you clarity.
Probable Futures is a non-profit climate literacy initiative offering digital materials, data tools, and customized engagements to individuals and organizations.
Our climate is changing, and we all need to prepare. Better outcomes start here.
- Topics on: Decarbonization
- Resource
A newsletter that vets the gigaton impact and commercial viability of climate solutions so people know where their careers can have the biggest impact.
- Topics on: Technology
- Resource
Clean energy journalism for a cooler tomorrow.
Canary Media is an independent, nonprofit newsroom covering the transition to clean energy and solutions to the climate crisis. We report on how the world is decarbonizing — in electricity, transportation, buildings, and industry — with a critical focus on finding out what works and what doesn’t. Through uncompromising reporting, our journalists dig into the ways policymakers, businesses, investors, and communities are moving toward a clean and equitable energy future.
- Topics on: Decarbonization
- Course
The ascent of Impact Investing has been remarkable. From its early roots in social entrepreneurship and community finance, the sector has grown exponentially, with the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) reporting a market size of over $1 trillion in assets under management by 2021. This growth reflects a paradigm shift in how investors, from large institutions to individual contributors, view the role of capital in addressing critical global challenges.
In this course, we will explore the evolution of Impact Investing, its current landscape, and the challenges it faces. We will examine key concepts such as the difference between Impact Investing and other forms of responsible investing, the importance of measurability and intentionality in impact investments, and the diverse range of impact investment vehicles and strategies.
Through a combination of case studies, lectures, and guest speakers from leading practitioners, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of how Impact Investing operates across different asset classes, including private equity, venture capital, and debt. We will also discuss the role of investor intentionality, the challenges of aligning interests between asset allocators and fund managers, and the innovative financial structures emerging within this dynamic field.
In IMPACT we will focus on impact investing while in the companion course ESG Investing (ESGINV) we explore the broader landscape of Responsible and ESG Investing. We will focus on the investor’s side, while other courses such as Strategy and Sustainability (STRATS) and ESG Risk Management (ESG) take the perspective of corporate managers and focus on how to deal with these issues from the corporate side.
- Topics on: Investing
- Case Description
- Topics on: ESG
- Case Description
Many challenges remain before the fuel can play a full role in decarbonisation. Explore the issues with this ‘instant teaching case study’
- Topics on: Planning
- Case Description
How should western policymakers use subsidies and tariffs to encourage drivers to switch? Probe the arguments with this ‘instant teaching case study’
- Topics on: Technology
- Case Description
As discarded cheap, disposable clothing clogs the environment, the business model is coming under pressure. Probe the arguments with this ‘instant teaching case study’
- Topics on: Planning
- Case Description
As demand grows for the material used in batteries, this MBA-style case study explores ethical dilemmas over unregulated mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- Topics on: Justice
- Case Description
Teaching objectives:
• Understand the challenges of sustainable transition in the fashion industry.
• Identify the key drivers of decarbonization in the fashion industry.
• Understand how sustainability can become part of a business’s strategy, and the trade-off leaders need to navigate in this process.
• Identify the most common implementation challenges of sustainability decisions, and how to overcome them.
Preparation Questions:
1. Should GANNI phase out virgin leather? If yes, what should be the timeline for doing that?
2. What should Lauren do to implement this decision? Reflect on the role of different stakeholders and suggest an action plan.
3. How is sustainability changing the fashion industry? What should firms do about them?
4. How is sustainability changing your industry? What should you do about it?
- Topics on: Justice
- Case Description
By 2023, companies of all sizes and across multiple industries had started to create and publicly announce Net Zero climate commitments that included hydrogen power as a source of clean energy. However, there was no technology available at scale to achieve widespread adoption of hydrogen power. Further, there was no globally recognized body guiding the regulation or implementation of hydrogen technology, leaving companies to set their own standards.
As a result, many questions about the feasibility of hydrogen use and the implications for climate change were left unanswered. For example: Did it make sense for a company to include hydrogen as a renewable energy source in their Net Zero strategy without widespread production of hydrogen? What were the implications when a company incorporated hydrogen technology into its climate commitment?
- Topics on: Technology
- Case Description
Greenwashing is a term that describes the situation where a company’s environmental claims exceed what the corporation is accomplishing through its environmental efforts. Trust in corporate entitles comes into question since consumers, investors, employees, and other interested parties can’t be certain which environmental claims represent real impact on addressing climate change, and which claims are inconsequential. This case study includes examples of corporate environmental efforts. These examples and associated case study questions are designed to support students in assessing whether greenwashing is being committed by a corporation, and the form in which it may be occurring.
- Topics on: Energy, Impact
- Case Description
In Fall 2020, researchers tested how much graduate students at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business understood about climate change science. 144 MBA students took a 4-minute ‘pop quiz’ with eight short questions gauging their general familiarity with climate change. While the quiz was not comprehensive, the results indicated students’ basic knowledge was limited. The implications were stark: if well-educated students at an elite institution were uninformed about the causes of climate change, how effectively could they address climate-related issues as future leaders? Why was there a disconnect between caring about the environment and lacking knowledge of how it was threatened?
- Topics on: Planning
- Case Description
In 1992, 179 countries effectively agreed to end the fossil-fuel age at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Yet thirty years later, the Earth Summit’s ‘new blueprint for international action’ had not stopped the increase of long-lived greenhouse-gas concentrations. In 2022, the United Nations stated ‘carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) can play a significant role in mitigating carbon emissions.’ Some climate experts considered CCUS necessary for reaching net-zero Greenhouse gas emissions. Others thought technology and infrastructure were too nascent to make a difference. Had decades-old pledges to stop fossil fuel use been replaced by capturing emissions?
- Topics on: Technology
- Case Description
In 2020, Carbon180 moved to Washington DC to focus increasingly on policy change that would catalyze carbon removal. President Joe Biden’s administration promised swift action to mitigate climate change. With Carbon180 releasing the first presidential transition book focused on carbon removal, the organization was poised to capitalize on its mission with politics on its side. However, optimism was tempered by realism about the limits of what could be achieved in Congress. Also, how receptive would US corporations be if green policies became legally enforceable? This case study is a continuation of ‘Carbon180: Choosing a Winning Strategy for Carbon Removal.’
- Topics on: Decarbonization