2025 Climate and Environment Emergency
Challenge Overview
Challenges for June 2025 will be announced in January 2025.
The Climate and Environment Emergency is one of the gravest threats facing the planet. This exciting and thought-provoking challenge has run very successfully for a number of years and will be proposed with a few new topics in 2024, that will explore technological, ecological, political and societal challenges associated with the Climate and Environment Emergency.
Students will consider a range of urgent topics such as Ten New Insights in Climate Science, Our Response to the Climate Emergency, Water Resources in the Climate and Environmental Emergency, Who and What is Land For?
This challenge will be run on Streatham Campus.
Enquiry Groups
Enquiry groups are the subtopic of the challenge that students will focus on for Grand Challenges Week. These are the enquiry groups that will be run on the Climate and Environment Emergency Challenge in June 2024:
This international pilot offers students the opportunity to participate in one of the most significant annual activities in climate research: choosing the ten most pressing findings in climate-related research published in the last year.
Each year the Earth League, Future Earth and the WMO co-sponsored World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) release ‘10 New Insights in Climate Science’, a synthesis of the most robust climate-related research findings available, which are then presented to the annual Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The University of Exeter and its strategic partner, Arizona State University (ASU), are members of the Earth League and this exciting new enquiry area will feed into the creation of the annual list of insights. The week will be delivered online/asynchronously to enable students from Exeter and Arizona to collaborate, with opportunities for optional in-person training/events. As a pilot, places will be limited.
The University of Exeter has published a detailed proposal and plan to get to Net Zero in response to the environment and climate emergency. This includes targets to reduce our direct emissions from electricity and gas usage to zero by 2030. This is an incredibly challenging target. How could we achieve that? What should be our response to enforcing this pledge? And how should the University be responding to the environmental crisis that is resulting in polluted and biologically impoverished land and seascapes?
“Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.” (S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
Along with air, food and shelter, water is one of the fundamental necessities of life yet water resources are under increasing pressure as the global population booms. Did you know that you use 150 litres of water each day? Have you ever thought where this wastewater goes? What are the solutions to protecting the environment to abate the impacts of stormwater overflows? What can society do to see this water as a precious resource rather than as a dumping ground? When will we drink, if ever, wastewater?
Who and what land is for (or not for) is a critical consideration in addressing contemporary climate and ecological challenges. Transforming land use decision making based upon sound economics, technology, policy and politics are particularly important right now – especially in tracking collective societal pathways towards the big-ticket national agenda of ‘net zero’ and ‘national nature restoration’. In this enquiry area you will get the chance to explore many different areas of contemporary and future land-use decision-making in the UK (and further afield) and innovate your own solutions to existing and novel land use challenges on the road towards more sustainable, just, and equitable land use futures.
