UC Climate Resilience Course
The UC Climate Resilience course is designed to promote collective hope, empowerment, and climate action integrated within our communities.
Find information for classes at your campus here.
Learn from global thought leaders and scientists at the helm of the climate movement!
We live in a rapidly changing world experiencing the climate crisis first-hand through frequent disasters such as wildfires, floods and weather extremes, all coinciding with geopolitical instability (“the polycrisis”).
To navigate this new world and build a meaningful future, new life-skills and training is urgently needed. In this course, students directly learn from world leaders delivering online mini-lectures, complemented by in-person experiential sessions co-led by expert UC professors as lecturers and facilitators, contemplative education advisors, and mindfulness-trained teachers, at each of the 10 UC campuses.
Students gain invaluable resilience skills, building both inner and outer strengths. Inner skill-building encompasses several contemplative practices including mindfulness and compassion. Outer skills build on the science of personal and social resilience and climate action; students must engage in a collective action project in groups, building a sense of belonging, and motivating empowerment and self-efficacy.
This course aims to fill a critical gap in climate education and well-being, and has shown promising results in graduates of the inaugural class in 2024.
Join this exciting movement!
To impact transformational resilience, the course offers both educational content as online video lectures curated from climate action leaders and experiential classroom sessions to build group cohesion.
Online Lectures
The online lectures are contributed by international leaders in climate science and action. These experts also participate as the board of advisors for this course to help foster future climate leaders, champions, and ambassadors.
In-Person Sessions
The in-person sessions are co-led by the course faculty leader and a mindfulness-trained instructor. These sessions are designed to build shared learning skills, process distress related to current world events in a safe space, and build social support and community collaboration with collective action, culminating in class climate projects.
Course Learning Objectives
01.
Transform personal climate distress into action
02.
Develop climate resilience skills, including mindfulness, psychological resilience, and emotional regulation in the context of climate change and climate despair
03.
Develop skills in nature-embedded mindfulness restoration
04.
Learn best practices for climate advocacy
05.
Learn climate communication: how to discuss climate with others
06.
Understand the power of joyful engagement, become knowledgeable climate action ambassadors for coping with the polycrisis, promoting change, and effective climate communication and advocacy
07.
Create connections with each other
08.
Assimilate essential concepts of Think Global, Act Local, that actions of each individual matter, and that Climate Action is the Work of a Lifetime