The science of sustainable development, what shall I teach?

Before the lectures

Next week I will teach the first of three lectures which constitute the Science of Sustainable Development within the Sustainable Development course at the University of Bristol. This is an open unit and can therefore be attended by first year undergraduate students from across the university.

The figure below shows how Sustainable Development is considered at the University of Bristol, clearly a hugely interdisciplinary and wide subject area!

Traditionally this unit has attracted a significant fraction of its cohort from Geographical Sciences, which is my current home department. This should make preparation of these three lectures relatively straightforward right? Wrong.A fascinating aspect of the School of Geographical Sciences is its breadth and variety of research and expertise. This is the case not simply because our physical geographers work on everything from past climates to flood inundation modelling but also because there is also the ‘human’ side to geography. My human geography colleagues research and teach on topics as varied as spatial and historical patterns of electoral voting and taxidermy.

This highly varied student body is complicated further by my own personal background. I am a ‘pure’ physicist by training, having studied for my PhD in the nanoscale physics of solar cells and LEDs.  After my PhD I have mostly been a climate modeller, with some time spent in environmental consultancy and so my career has been undeniably ‘environmental’ from start to finish so far. That said, I would struggle to think of more than a few topics in my undergraduate days which were explicitly linked to sustainability. Perhaps this is not surprising however when one considers how large the core of physics is as a university-level subject. How can lecturing staff make quantum mechanics and astrophysics relevant to Sustainable Development? Is it even possible or meaningful? These questions are certainly outside the scope of this short blog post!

Moving back to the subject matter of my lectures, I had to consider what links climate change, climate modelling and environmentalism in such a way that the term Sustainable Development can be introduced scientifically in three parts? When I posed this question to myself in this way, the answer was clear; The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC for short, not to be confused with the Independent Police Complaints Commission! This body was founded by the UN and World Meteorological Organisation in the late 1980s to provide a synthesis on the state of knowledge of the climate system and how humans are interfering with it. The IPCC has to date published five of these Assessment Reports and they are split into three Working Groups:

  1. The Physical Science Basis
  2. Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
  3. Mitigation of Climate Change.

The bulk of my work since 2008 (at the Met Office and at Bristol) has concerned climate modelling and therefore fits well within the remit of Working Group one. Theoretically I could have stopped there and taught three lectures on the meteorology and climatology of climate change, this would probably however only really appealed to those students who had taken A Level physics. The natural diversification of the three Working Groups was the only solution and I therefore decided to prepare one lecture on each. This also provided me with an opportunity to improve my own knowledge of Working Groups 2 and 3, something I had been meaning to do for a while! I should state at this point that there is no scientist in the world with an in depth knowledge of every aspect of even one of the Working Groups. Working Group 1 alone has over 1500 pages of fully cited scientific text for example!

After lecture one

As I write this part of the blog post I have just given my first lecture in the series. This lecture tallied well with my research interests and scientific knowledge and I now have a little under a week to finish my preparation for the next two lectures. Crucially, my biggest challenge will undoubtedly be the effective teaching of Working Groups two and three and I will aim to report back with another blog post after my lectures have run their course.

Finally, one aspect of this course which I hope that will come across in my teaching is my aim to emphasise the interdisciplinary nature and breadth of this subject. As I said in my first lecture, I am a physicist working in a geography department and lecturing to students from all five faculties. If this doesn’t illustrate the cross cutting nature of this subject then I don’t know what does!

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member, Dr Jonny Williams, an environmental physicist working in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol.

The big commitment: How we’re ensuring all our students encounter sustainability at Bristol

The University of Bristol has signed a UNESCO Global Action Programme commitment, in advance of there launch of the next UNESCO strategy for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).

As the UNESCO decade for ESD draws to an end, UNESCO has reviewed progress, and will this November launch a new Global Action Programme focussed on four key areas which most urgently need more attention.

My own journey, and Bristol’s very much reflects the picture UNESCO has found. A decade ago ESD was largely below the radar in Higher Education (HE).  Lots of great things were going on, but as local initiatives by keen academics. Typical of the time, we won our first Times Higher Award and Green Gown Award for what was then a very innovative interdisciplinary open unit on Sustainable Development, available to any student, whatever their degree. Nearly a decade later, UNESCO has set us all the challenge of moving from hot spots of excellence to whole institution approaches. Bristol has committed to meeting that challenge.

The University of Bristol collects
its 2nd Green Gown Award in
2013.

We changed gear to a whole institution approach about three years ago, when we were selected as  one of six Green Academies by HEA. I’ve never been a fan of labels, but in this case it was the catalyst for moving to a whole institution approach – and in 2013 the University was awarded another Green Gown, but this time for whole institution continuous change. The whole University  is taking education for sustainable development  seriously, every part of the institution is doing something. Our challenge now is to connect all of this is up, to deepen student opportunities to engage with uncertainty, with the challenges of sustainability in their studies, informal activity and in the subliminal curriculum. The key for me is ensuring our students have adaptive capacity – the ability to live with uncertainty and take decisions based on evidence. Without those skills the sirens of cosy avoidance of the crisis  facing our planet beckon. We can let the evidence speak for itself, as long as our students have the skills to listen.

Our UNESCO commitment is to ensure all students encounter sustainability through their formal studies, have opportunities to link theory and practice through informal activity or community based projects,  learn subliminally about sustainable lifestyles through the way the precinct is run (estates) and understand how central sustainability in its many aspects is to our research. This autumn in advance of the Nagoya launch, all Bristol students will be encouraged to take the Global Sustainability Literacy Test.  As one of the launch partners, the Cabot Institute  as a research institute is central to this – showing the importance of living with uncertainty and bringing people together on an interdisciplinary basis to address these challenges.

Whether your expertise is in environmental, social, economic or cultural sustainability you have an important part to play in building both the knowledge and skill sets to help achieve the UNESCO aims.

Bristol has pledged to play its part.

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This blog post is written by Cabot Institute member, Chris Willmore, University Academic Director of Undergraduate Studies, University of Bristol

Further reading
– Education for Sustainable Development at the University of Bristol
Community Based Learning at the Cabot Institute