Last May I moderated a panel at a 2-day event hosted by Duke University focused on climate change and higher education. The conference was called All In: Higher Education, Interdisciplinarity and Our Collective Climate Challenge and brought together faculty and administrators from 2- and 4- year institutions from across the US to engage in deep conversations about higher ed's role in addressing the climate challenge. We formed workgroups and wrestled with a broad array of topics, including integrating climate education with racial and social equity education, using college campuses as testbeds for experiential and applied learning approaches, creating turnkey resources for instructor development and to facilitate inclusion of climate and sustainability into curricula, and training the green workforce of tomorrow.

The All In conference is where I met today's guest, Dr. Toddi Steelman, Vice President & Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability at Duke University, the person behind the conference and also driving Duke’s ambitious Climate Commitment. We talked about what Duke’s climate commitment entails, how the college was able to take such a bold step when many other colleges struggle to even acknowledge climate change, and how Duke can be a model for other institutions of higher education.

Guest bio
Dr. Toddi Steelman is currently Duke's new Vice President and Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability in 2023. She had previously served as the Stanback Dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University where, during her initial term, she oversaw the launch of two new majors to help advance climate, earth science, and environmental literacy among undergraduate students; invested in efforts to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion within the school; secured philanthropic support for new faculty hiring; expanded the school’s engagement with other schools and units at Duke and external partners; and oversaw changes to the school’s research and business management infrastructure to better support research activities. She also played a leading role in the planning and development of the Duke Climate Commitment.

Prior to being named dean of the Nicholas School in 2018, Dr. Steelman served as the first permanent executive director of the University of Saskatchewan’s School of Environment and Sustainability, after serving 11 years on the faculty in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University. She also was a faculty member in the Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado a Denver from 1997 to 2001.

She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, a Master in Public Affairs from Princeton University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and International Studies from West Virginia University.

Resources and links
Terra.do's Learning for Action course
The Duke Climate Commitment
Aspen's This is Planet Ed Higher Ed Action Plan

Climate.edu is written and produced by Richard Sebastian. If you liked this episode, please subscribe. The Climate.edu theme song "Serious Business (CC-BY- NC) was written, performed, and openly licensed by Serge Quadrado. Check out all of his music on his page on the Free Music Archive.

You can go to the show website at http://www.climatedotedu.com to find details about this and other episodes of the podcast, get news and updates related to climate change and higher ed, or to get in touch.

For the average person, the complexity of climate change and lack of clarity on impactful solutions can be paralyzing. For government leaders and decision-makers, it can help drive misguided investment in pie-in-the sky solutions that avoid more impactful policy decisions. En-Roads, a free, easy-to-use online dashboard and modeling tool co-developed by today’s guest, Andrew Jones, Executive Director of Climate Interactive, and a team at MIT’s Sloan Sustainability Initiative, allows anyone, from my mom to President Biden, to test out and explore the real-world impact of various climate solutions, generating outcomes based on systems thinking, dynamic systems modeling, and the latest climate data.

En-Roads is a great example of how the research activity, intellectual heft, innovative culture, and educational mission of an institution like MIT can be operationalized to meaningfully address climate change. Since its release in 2019, En-roads has influenced world leaders, policy-makers, and CEOS, been a centerpiece of high stakes climate talks, and used to train almost 800 Climate Ambassadors, who are scaling the use of the tool in the workplace, communities, schools, and on college campuses.

On this episode I talk to Drew about the origin of En-Roads, how the tool has influenced smart climate policies, its use as an educational tool, and his vision for En-Roads’s future.

Guest Bio

Andrew Jones is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Climate Interactive and a Research Affiliate at MIT Sloan. He is an expert on international climate and energy policy and a system dynamics modeler.

Drew led the teams that developed En-ROADS. He now teaches systems thinking and climate policy at MIT Sloan, Stanford, and UNC-Chapel Hill. He lives with his family in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina.

Resources & Links
Climate Interactive website
En-Roads Climate Simulator
En-Roads Climate Ambassador Program

Climate.edu is written and produced by Richard Sebastian. If you liked this episode, please subscribe. The Climate.edu theme song "Serious Business (CC-BY- NC) was written, performed, and openly licensed by Serge Quadrado. Check out all of his music on his page on the Free Music Archive.

You can go to the show website at http://www.climatedotedu.com to find details about this and other episodes of the podcast, get news and updates related to climate change and higher ed, or to get in touch.

The nature of the climate crisis, and the unprecedented speed with which the world needs to address it, requires global, national, and local actions that are informed by the latest research from multiple disciplines. However, like a lot of academic research, the majority of climate change research is locked behind the paywall of one a handful of big academic publishers, often limiting how it can be applied to the wicked problem of climate change.

My guest today is working to change this. For the past several years, Dr. Monica Granados has been leading the Open Climate Campaign, a global effort by the nonprofit Creative Commons, to promote open access to climate research in order to "accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity. " According to the Open Climate Campaign, to solve the global challenge of climate change, “ knowledge about climate--research, data, educational resources, software-- must be open.”

Monica and I discuss what open access is, the truly messed up grift that is academic publishing, resources faculty who are interested in sharing their research can use to make their work openly accessible, and future directions for the open climate campaign.

Guest Bio
Dr. Monica Granados has a PhD in ecology from McGill University. While working on her PhD, Monica discovered incentives in academia promote practices that make knowledge less accessible and has since devoted her career to working in the open science space in pursuit of making knowledge more equitable and accessible. She has worked on open knowledge initiatives with Mozilla, PREreview and the Government of Canada. Monica is now an Assistant Director at Creative Commons working on the Open Climate Campaign promoting open access of climate and biodiversity research.

Show Notes
Creative Commons website
Open Climate Campaign website
Nelson Memo
Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (Helios)

Climate.edu is written and produced by Richard Sebastian. If you liked this episode, please subscribe. The Climate.edu theme song "Serious Business (CC-BY- NC) was written, performed, and openly licensed by Serge Quadrado. Check out all of his music on his page on the Free Music Archive.

You can go to the show website at http://www.climatedotedu.com to find details about this and other episodes of the podcast, get news and updates related to climate change and higher ed, or to get in touch.