Melbourne Climate Action Labs

How might university leaders step up to address the climate crisis? 

As our planet faces rising temperatures and escalating environmental challenges, we need to harness humanity's collective intelligence and action, much like we did during the pandemic. Remember those initial pandemic months? It felt endless and without ready solutions.  Similarly, with climate change, the path ahead appears dire, leading towards more extreme weather, species loss, poverty, and a pervasive sense of climate hopelessness.

But we cannot afford to let climate despair define the next generation's worldviews. 

What if universities played a pivotal role in reversing this downward trend? Imagine a future by 2050 where the climate has cooled, ecosystems have begun regenerating, and humanity has evolved to become more humble, wise, and deeply respectful of our planet.

Empowering young adults with skills and mindsets fit for a world in crisis becomes crucial. It's about equipping them not just for today's challenges but to drive a future of planetary renewal.

A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

This University-led Climate Action Fellows program aims to cultivate structural and cultural change in the academy to accelerate climate action. Fellows will deploy leadership, try out interventions, influence public policy, and interpret resulting system dynamics within their universities.

Many people agree that transformative change in educational systems is required for future social well-being. However, catalyzing transformative change in educational institutions is emotionally exhausting and politically risky.  

Climate action will require new mindsets and a breed of young professionals who can skillfully work across disciplines and organizational boundaries, and universities need to start developing millions of such young changemakers.  

This program will help fellows prototype new ways of cultivating a culture of co-creation across disciplines, universities, and countries by bringing the Fellows together as an online community. Ideas and techniques for inducing systems-level change will be introduced, drawing from various leadership and systems change authors.

The Climate Action Labs in a nutshell

The consumerist, hierarchical, and anthropocentric mindsets where humans treat planet Earth as a grocery and landfill are deeply ingrained into our culture and curricula.

The university-led climate action programs provide a community for individuals seeking to cultivate transformative change in universities and in the city/national ecosystems of which the universities are part.  We will go beyond the usual managerial approaches such as strategic planning and organizational development and engage in difficult deeper conversations about the often-hidden mindsets, structural inequities, and cultural biases that produce global warming.    

In this community, we’ll work through common obstacles and political dynamics. This is dynamic, ambiguous, and often exhausting work, and we'll labor as a community to renew ourselves and learn from each other. 

Who is it for?

 Designed for academics, senior university leaders, students, researchers, advocates, city policy-makers, and changemakers, our initiatives are for those who want to engage in the work of leading transformative change in the academy and cities. Working in the area of confronting biases and reimagining the mental models requires time and space for reflection, and our programs aim to organize and support a community of leaders willing to take on this work individually and collectively. 

You're welcome to join us regardless of what type of planetary regeneration program you want to start on your campus or city. Many of you will have programs that fall under any of these categories: sustainability, energy transition, zero carbon university, engaged scholarship, student engagement, project-based learning, sustainable enterprise incubators, extension programs, creative inquiry, etc.

How does it work?

Climate Action Labs Network: Our universities will need to evolve the language of partnering to heal the planet. Hosting a Climate Action Lab within the campuses helps the different disciplines comprehend the interdependency and scale of the work ahead of us and serves as a hub that connects different silos. 

Scalable Intra- and Inter-University Learning Networks: Many lead universities with multiple campuses and dozens of schools. We will work with some tools and strategies to help you maneuver through networks to compensate for the limitations of hierarchical behaviors.

Transnational Student Impact Projects: Global Citizenship mindsets will be cultivated among instructors and students through collaborative transnational impact projects.