Over 117 climate courses across ANU

ANU runs over 60 undergraduate and 89 postgraduate courses that address the multiple dimensions of climate change, from climate science to economics, law, policy and governance aspects of climate change vulnerability, adaptation and mitigation.

Master of Climate Change

Climate change is one of the most important and complex problems encountered by humankind. As its impacts become more and more apparent, people who understand its multiple dimensions and can contribute to developing, communicating and implementing innovative solutions are in increasingly high demand.

Turning a passion into a career – read about Master of Climate Change student, Caitlin Sears

Read more about the Master of Climate Change

ANU Climate Change Institute supplementary scholarship

Climate change is a challenge which transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. Identifying and implementing solutions demands a perspective which can integrate insights from many different domains. In 2017, the CCI established a top-up scholarship to encourage this integrative approach – we’re delighted to highlight two of the recipients:

Understanding societal attitudes to climate change and carbon dioxide removal

“I’m aiming to understand the context, framing, communication gaps and discussion on negative emissions, to assist the technologies in moving from pilot-scale theory to scaled-up practice.”  Yuanyuan Shang, National Centre for Public Awareness of Science

Read Yuanyuan's story

Who’ll pay for the losses and damages caused by climate change?

“The end goal is to create a holistic framework that covers financing of all aspects of loss and damage and that can be adopted internationally.”  Melanie Pill, Fenner School of Environment & Society

Read Melanie's story

Climate Change short courses

The Climate Change Institute regularly delivers short professional courses on recent advances in climate science and the social, policy, economic and governance aspects of climate change for policymakers and professionals. Students include members of government departments and commercial participants.

2018 Climate risk masterclasses

In 2018, the Department of the Environment and Energy delivered four climate risk masterclasses in 2018, to build the capability of Australian public servants manage climate risks to policies, programs and assets. The ANU Climate Change Institute has provided four keynote presentations on ‘responding to climate impacts’ as part of the masterclass curriculum. The CCI is also scheduled to deliver a series of additional presentations in 2019 as part of ongoing implementation of the masterclasses, including one class with participants from state and territory governments

Climate Change in Africa course

From 2019, the ANU will be delivering an eight week intensive course on climate change adaptation via the Australia Awards – Africa on behalf of The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The course is led by the Climate Change Institute’s Dr Bec Colvin and Prof Jamie Pittock (Fenner School of Environment and Society) and is in partnership with The University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), with a range of subject matter experts from across the CCI’s ANU membership teaching into course modules. 25-30 thirty students from across Africa will be selected to participate in the course. The first two weeks will be delivered in South Africa, followed by six weeks in Australia, and a programme of post-course engagement, project implementation, mentoring, and reflection. The course aims to equip and empower students to be expert champions for climate chang adaptation in their own contry and policy context.  The course team was selected via a competitive tender process, and has been awarded over $2.6 million to develop and deliver the course.

Evening course

The Centre for Continuing Education Course ran a course in 2018:  ‘The climate change debate: Truth, lies and misconceptions’.  The course was headed by Clem Davis, with lectures from Mark Howden, Janette Lindesay, Liz Hanna, Paul Burke and many others. The course is due to be offered again in 2019.

Student achievements

Here are a couple of student achievements in 2018:

• Guy Leedon, PhD student at the Research School of Management ANU and ANU CCI member, was awarded the flagship Australian Government (Endeavour) and French Government (Eiffel) postgraduate scholarships to investigate drivers of sustainable agriculture in the French and Australian wine industries.
• Honours student, Mark Dawkins, co-supervised by Dr Grace Chiu, developed an extension to the highly computationally intensive approach, Bayesian melding. The extended approach is a statistical model-based framework that can reconcile (i) theoretical models that are stochastic in nature (e.g., climate models) with (ii) statistical models of field data that are inherently noisy. Two results of (i)+(ii) are the (a) formal model-based evaluation of uncertainty in the model estimates and (b) formal model-based calibration of the theoretical model. Both (a) and (b) have been lacking in Climate Science or complex systems analyses. At present, although Mark’s method under currently available computational infrastructure is not yet fully practical for handling highly complex stochastic models such as Global Climate Models, it is anticipated that in the near future, computational burden will be substantially reduced as our research on Bayesian melding continues while infrastructure will also improve.