Session 7 Lightning talk: Exploring climate change through student participation in a mock world climate summit

Abstract

Session overview:

Incorporating sustainability and climate action into all teaching programmes is an important part of the LJMU strategy. This session will showcase classes that I have been running with undergraduate and postgraduate students, to help them better understand how global policies can tackle climate change.  These sessions involve running a mock World Climate Summit (COP), where students are asked to role-play different stakeholder groups e.g. less developed countries, oil and gas producers, protest groups etc.  Groups propose policy options (e.g. subsidising renewable energy, taxing fossil fuels etc) and the impact of these policies are modelled live in the summit using a very intuative, web based online tool - EnRoads. This allows us to see the impact on different fuel use, CO2 emissions, and predicted global temperature rise, of the groups' proposed policies. Each group gets to nominate a policy - or revise another group's policy, in a series of policy rounds. It allows us to see not only which policies are more effective, but brings out the vested interests, inequalities and politics that make tackling climate change globally so challenging. Events are lively, fun and a great way to embed better understanding of both the science and  wider issues.  They are something I am keen to run in other programmes and there are other options for using the EnRoads tool for teaching that I will highlight.

Key learning points from this session:

If you attend this lightning session you will get to see a fun and engaging way to discuss climate change actions with student groups.

I am keen to run these events for other programmes and can also share my experience of other ways of using the EnRoads tool.

Exploring climate change through student participation in a mock world climate summit PowerPoint. Only LJMU staff and students have access to this resource.