Climate Change Leadership – MOOC

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5.8

7-11 Gas Station, Salem, Oregon, USA, photo by Dan Meyers.

Your own climate change leadership plan

This concluding assignment for the course asks you to finalise your own climate change leadership plan based on what you have learned throughout the course. This should also be a basis for you to take action in real life and use this course as a starting step for it.

The assignment has three parts:

1. A brief description and assessment of the challenge
2. Proposed targets
3. Next steps

Write your assignment in a text editor first (Word, Notepad or similar) to avoid losing any work.

1. Description and background assessment (~150 words)

Briefly describe your climate change challenge (it may be helpful to review the questions from week 2 here). Then assess the challenge:

• What current trends and practices relate to your climate change leadership challenge? For example, what current behaviours (eg. people driving to work rather than biking) or technologies (eg. inefficient stoves or housing) contribute to the problem?
• What systems and structures affect your challenge? For example, what current routines, infrastructure, information flows, power structures, etc., may create barriers to or opportunities for change?
• Finally, what current beliefs, values, worldviews and paradigms may stand in the way for change – or facilitate it? Are there any psychological barriers to change?

2. Targets for an ideal future (~200 words)

Specify what kind of change that you wish to you see in your own context. This could include, but is not limited to either/or:

• Practical targets: What innovations and changes do you propose? What concrete, measurable targets do you propose, and in what time frame? (For example, reduction in CO2-emissions, the introduction of a line of climate smart products or services, or an increase of people using public transport.)
• What changes in systems and structures could create conditions for the change you are striving for?
• What shifts in beliefs, values or worldviews could make these changes easier? How may we overcome psychological or cultural barriers to change?

3. Next steps (~50 words)

Make a plan including five steps that could help to bridge the gap between the current reality and your ideal future.

And then stick to it!

Assignment Guidelines

The reviewers will be asked to give you feedback on the following aspects of your assignment, so you should consider these when writing:

• Has the learner answered all questions and met the word limit?
• To what extent has the learner been coherent in their plan?
• How far does the learner achieve the objective of being realistic and ambitious?

Your assignment

Please check your assignment carefully before submission as it cannot be edited afterwards. Submit the assigment as pdf, word or text file (use images and graphs to support your text) here or in the Padlet below (press the white plus + sign in the pink circle).

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