Co-Designing Climate Curricula Across Borders

The biggest problem we’ve ever faced?

To the UN’s Secretary General, humanity has already failed. We have failed to limit global heating to the 1.5°C threshold implored in 2015’s landmark Paris Agreement on climate change. We will face ‘devastating consequences’, he stated, if we don’t change course.

For Aronowsky of Columbia’s Climate School, today’s key question is how we reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, not whether we do. This sees adaptation to a changed climate as increasingly as important as mitigating rises in carbon emissions.

As a global society, it seems we have a very clear fork in the road ahead. We can continue with the business-as-usual practices that much of 20th-century economic development was based on, yet which now shows significant risks in continuing with. Or we can take a different path and find ourselves building other ways of doing things.

What to make of a choice like that if you were a young person at university today, attempting to work your way towards your future career path? And how do we best prepare today’s generation of young people for the environmentally challenged world that they will find themselves living and working in?

The Paris Agreement, like many collective attempts at addressing the climate crisis, describes the importance of education in addressing this pressing global challenge. Education, however, is an extended process that transforms both individuals and societies over time rather than being a short-term fix to apply to isolated issues.

The climate and nature crises are highly complex, boundary-crossing ‘wicked problems’ that ask for pedagogies that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. They demand teaching, learning and assessment practices that innovate and enable learners to feel empowered to take action in the world, rather than just continuing with existing more familiar educational models.

Perhaps it’s time for teaching and learning to rise to the moment we’re in.

Educating for climate and nature

In 2025, City St George’s, University of London launched an interdisciplinary undergraduate module simply titled ‘Sustainability and Climate Change’. The module aims to provide a grounding in the complex and interconnected natures of these challenges. Initially, for students of The City Law School, it is taught by experts from each of the university’s six schools, unpacking these issues from multiple dimensions. It is also delivered with an array of community assessment partners from outside the university.

When the second iteration comes around in 2026, the module will be made available to students from four more schools, bringing those from other disciplinary backgrounds together with our prospective lawyers. The goal at City St George’s is for it to ultimately be available to any student that wants to take it.

The module provides an inclusive and accessible educational offer, facilitated through digital technologies, that has been co-designed by academics, professional services staff, and students from across the university. It seeks to build skills and competences – including in group work, self-reflection, using digital technologies and systems thinking – that will allow students to make a difference in their future careers.

Disciplinary insights are provided via a topic series, spanning areas including energy and technology, the economics of sustainability, or narrative dimensions of climate change. We also look at topics like law and global governance, food systems, and the psychology of sustainability. The module incorporates a flipped learning approach to the topics, where students explore bespoke multimedia-based materials before engaging with each other in a series of large group lectures led by expert academics from across the university.

For the group assessment, students interrogate a sustainability challenge set by one of our external partners and deliver a digital artefact in a medium of their choosing in response. This gives them ownership and responsibility in their learning and looks to work within the grain of their intrinsic motivations.

There is also an extracurricular track running through the module, giving students an opportunity to participate in field trips using virtual reality, to take part in volunteering opportunities on locally-based sustainability activities, or to explore climate-focused games.

Building collaborations of the willing

Summarising the story of this module so far seems relatively easy on the other side of delivering such an idea for the first time. Looking back to 2022, though, the university had a big gap in its provision of broad-based climate and sustainability education. The module itself was little more than an interesting idea that faced seemingly insurmountable internal barriers to ever being realised.

The idea for it was discussed with multiple institutional leaders, interrogated extensively, and workshopped iteratively, while a coalition of the willing was meticulously built around the idea. With patience, persistence, a determination to flow around obstacles rather than be halted by them, and the invited input of dozens of experts from across the university, a way forward was found. A truly interdisciplinary initiative was successfully brought into being and a strong foundation was built for something much more impactful.

If this is what is possible within a single institution, how might we coordinate wider efforts and deliver impact at a scale that can make a bigger difference?

Although universities have long enabled cross-cultural collaboration and exchange opportunities for the broadening of horizons, networked digital technologies have opened up the possibilities for more in this space, particularly for those unable to partake in physical travel. An example of this is the practice broadly known as ‘virtual exchange’.

Although virtual exchange traditionally refers to the computer-mediated connecting of language learners through structured educational interactions and collaborations, the practice is also used outside of language learning. This includes attempts by institutions to internationalise the curriculum or to simply offer students a means of engaging with peers in other countries via collaborative online projects.

The European Commission’s Erasmus+ programme is an example of a large-scale approach to institutional cooperation and cross-border student interchanges. Virtual exchanges are included as part of the overall programme, demonstrating that precedent is already there for large-scale cross-cultural collaboration that is both embedded within formal curricula and enabled by digital technologies.

How can we build on this?

Your call to action

This is where you come in.

If you’ll be at OEB, I invite you to join me in a Boardroom Dialogue to contribute your ideas and expertise in exploring how such a model could be applied across different institutions or as an international collaboration. We’ll be looking at what mechanisms might already exist for inter-institutional collaborations, and what benefits or barriers such an initiative might face.

For those of you not at OEB, I’ll have the same call for action going out on LinkedIn when the session is live, so you too can be part of the discussion there.

Come and join me to help explore educational responses to one of the biggest issues of our times. Together, we can build something new.

Join Dominic for it’s Boardroom Dialogue on Friday 5th: Co-Designing Climate Curricula Across Borders.

Written for OEB 2025 by Dominic Pates.