World’s top 20 universities are failing to offer adequate courses to fight climate crisis, youth campaign group says
- All top 20 universities worldwide fell short on climate change elements in their courses, including MIT, Tsinghua and Peking universities, according to Mock COP
- While some concerns were raised about the methodology, the findings suggest more sustainability education is needed to prepare future global leaders
Mock COP, an international, youth-led climate change organisation under the charity Student Organising for Sustainability UK (SOS-UK), last week released the “1.5 Degrees” league table that assessed the world’s top universities that have performed the “worst” in preparing their students on climate change issues.
The campaign group evaluated the world’s top 20 universities in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings on how the courses in five key streams – engineering, law, economics, politics and health – align with the actions needed to tackle the climate emergency and ecological crisis.
The report suggests that the top universities responsible for educating future world leaders do not have sufficient education on the content and skills needed to tackle climate change and sustainability, said Quinn Runkle, the director of education at SOS-UK.
“We wanted to explore how the universities are teaching content related to the climate crisis [but] we didn’t see nearly enough coverage of sustainability topics in these key courses of the so-called top universities,” she said.
