Mastering Climate Change: Explore Strategies for a Sustainable Future with Prof. Jorge Vinuales

Professor Jorge Vinuales holds the Harold Samuel Chair of Law and Environmental Policy at the University of Cambridge, where he founded the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Governance (C-EENRG). Jorge has extensive experience advising governments, international organisations, companies and investors on strategic, policy and governance matters arising from the sustainability transition.

Jorge is the course lead for Climate Change for Decision-Makers: Challenges, Transformations, Strategies, a short 6-week online course from the University of Cambridge. Today, he answers a series of questions about what lead him to create a course around one of the biggest challenges of our time.

What Governing Interventions Drive the Sustainability Transition in Climate and Energy Policy?

My current focus is on understanding what specific governance interventions can accelerate the sustainability transition, particularly in the areas of climate and energy policy. That requires an analysis of global environmental change, its societal implications and the technologies to put the world on a pathway that may avert disaster.

What Makes the Climate and Energy Policy Field Both Exciting and Daunting?

The most exciting part of this work is also the most daunting. Given the risk of crossing certain critical thresholds in the next few years, the 2020-2030 may well be the single most consequential decade in the 150,000 years natural history of homo sapiens sapiens, our species. Addressing a challenge of such magnitude is something that exceeds the bounds of any and every discipline, so we have to develop a sort of transdisciplinary problem-focused perspective.

What Are the Climate Change Tipping Points and Positive Policy Interventions? Exploring Environmental Research and Transformational Initiatives

The critical thresholds that may be crossed this decade, such as the massive reduction or disappearance of the Arctic ice cover, the release of a methane bomb from Siberian permafrost or the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, one of the two lungs of the planet, are often referred to as tipping points. This means that at some point, an additional burden on an environmental system – or to use an image, an additional straw on a camel’s back – may lead to sudden and irreversible change – breaking a camel’s back. Yet, there are also positive policy tipping points, namely areas of policy intervention that can disrupt an entire system, such as energy production, transportation, industry – and make it consistent with the pathways humanity needs to avert catastrophe. In the past years, in the context of a large research project, together with colleagues and institutions from Brazil, China, India, the EU and the UK, we have been investigating what these ‘acupunctural pressure points’ could be and how to trigger positive change through policy.

Who Inspired the Innovative Approach to Understanding Climate Change? Unveiling the Vision and Format Behind the Transversal Course Design

Two main things led me to make the decision. First, over the years, in both my teaching and my practice, I’ve noticed that there is a need for a genuinely transversal understanding of climate change as a societal problem, in addition to the highly specialised but often narrow disciplinary focus that one acquires at university. Secondly, initially, I thought about writing a book about this 360-degree view but I quickly realised that I had to think twice about how exactly to convey this view or, in other words, about the format. Instead of writing a purely text-based introduction to it, I thought it may be better to explore another channel. From this perspective, the course is in many ways my attempt at not writing yet another book but at conveying content in a more innovative and learner-friendly format.

What's the 360-Degree Takeaway? Hopes for Learners Exploring Climate Change in a 6-Week Journey

I very much hope that learners will acquire a 360-degree view of climate change as a societal problem, with its general implications but also its very specific ones to the operations of a range of organisations. Six weeks may not be lot of time, but it is sufficient to put enough pieces of the puzzle together for learners to see the overall image the full puzzle would convey.

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