Ahead of the 30th annual UN climate meeting, COP30, we sat down with three lecturers from MSc Climate Change Development & Policy, a multidisciplinary degree led by the University of Sussex and delivered in partnership with IDS, to discuss why the world urgently needs new thinkers and leaders in this area.
Click below to watch a film of the conversation (seven-minute watch) or scroll down to read the transcript.
Interviewer: Why is this course so relevant?
Dr Melissa Lazenby, Associate Professor in Physical Geography, University of Sussex: Climate change is a really big issue. If you step back and take a look at the bigger picture, it’s pretty concerning. But we face somewhat of a paradox: on the one hand we’ve got records being broken, the WMO saying we’ve reached 1.5 in this last year, we’ve breached the Paris Agreement temporarily, we’re reaching records we’ve not seen before. Climate change is continuing at quite a quick pace, the rate of it is very concerning. We’ve got extreme weather events all around the world happening more and more, which we know are attributed to human influence.
We’ve also got lots of solutions in place, renewables are getting taken up at scale, the prices are coming down. However, even with all this knowledge of the climate emergency and knowing what we know as scientists, the mitigation is too slow.
There’s also a very difficult political context, such as the US pulling out of the Paris agreement for a second time. It can be really disheartening for people working in the sector and not seeing the changes that we need to make to reduce these kinds of extreme events and the warming that we’re seeing.
Interviewer: Why is it important to study climate change and development today?
Dr Olivia Taylor, Assistant Professor in Geography, University of Sussex: To anyone who’s interested in or who cares about this issue, we invite you to come and be with a community of other people who also care about climate change and who want to make this the focus of their careers, because there’s strength in numbers. This is more than a group of students – it is a community who want to learn more and commit their careers to working on climate and development issues. And we’re stronger together!
Interviewer: IDS and the University of Sussex is ranked number one in the world for development studies. But what does that mean for our students?
Dr Olivia Taylor: There are three things that are fantastic about in this course:
Firstly, it’s a really interdisciplinary course. It’s taught across three different institutions. (University of Sussex’s School of Global Studies, SPRU – Science Policy Research Unit and IDS) because we recognise there’s no one size fits all solution to climate change, which is a huge, multifaceted issue.
Students start off with a good grounding in the physical science basis of climate change theory. But then they go on to specialise, whether that’s on the economic and policy dimensions or the equity and justice areas of climate change.
Secondly, we have really research led teaching because of being ranked number one in the world for Development Studies. We have a hive of activity, with different academics and scholars working on different aspects of climate and development. We have so many different public seminars and events, workshops and open lectures happening all the time that it would keep our students super busy if they were to go to all of them.
And finally, the students themselves are what makes this such a special master’s degree. Very often they come from really established professional careers working on climate and development. It’s such an international cohort – we have students from dozens of different countries, and they bring so much experience into our seminars and discussions. We learn a lot from them, and they learn a lot from each other.
Interviewer: What knowledge and skills will you gain from studying this course?
Dr Lars Otto Naess, Research Fellow, IDS: It’s really a mix of theory and practice. From climate science to the different ways we can reduce emissions and mitigate, but also how we can adapt and tackle the many impacts of climate change. We have modules on climate resilient development, low carbon development and energy policy. But beyond the theoretical knowledge, promoting a critical mindset is core to what we teach.
We also focus on the practical knowledge and methods needed in the real world, such as climate risk management tools, GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and modelling tools.
Over the 15 years now that the course has been running, we have people in all corners of the world, working in all sorts of different organisations: think tanks, UN organisations, Red Cross, and the private sector. Graduates also go on to do further degrees, PhDs and so we see people go on to do a range of different careers.
And I think it’s important that as well as emerging with knowledge and skills, this degree also gives you the confidence to be able to engage with this enormous area, which can feel very overwhelming.
It’s easy to be quite pessimistic about the future, and although this course is grounded in realism, we also equip students with the tools and methods to be able to see where change can happen, and it CAN happen. I think that optimism and hope is really important to hold onto.
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