Climate change is one of the most challenging issues worldwide affecting all regions around the world. In some regions, its effects involved extreme weather events and rainfall while in others involved extreme heat waves and droughts. Climate change is a key driver of migration and food insecurity. These impacts are expected to intensify in the coming decades. Countries from the Mediterranean arch are particularly vulnerable to climate change and this is why CTwoSEAS project focus on these countries. Project partners have identified the lack of a comprehensive training in European High education institutions which provide a pan European and transversal training to European students and teachers in climate change issues. We must change our habits and protect the environment to conserve it. And that must be done from the education and training of the new generations, with the handicap that there is no time to lose. The climatic catastrophe has been announced for not less than 20 years, with a different degree of credibility and a lot of skepticism. However, at this time there is a great consensus among scientists around the world about the serious consequences for humanity and for life on our planet if we don't stop on time this climate change. The mail goal of this project is to boost a better educated society in climate change issues in order to reinforce EU policies against climate change approaching the topic from a scientific, ethical-social, philosophical and economical point of view. CTwoSEAS project proposes the development of a cross-cutting subject in climate change with an integral view covering all aspects related to this topic from a multidisciplinary standpoint. In order to reinforce the aims of this project, the cross-cutting subject will be complemented with a digital space (web page) and a community of practice. At the end of the project, an event entitles “Climate Change: From Science to Society” will be carried out. This event will be a window to disseminate the project to other EU educational institutions and the general public. Project partners include five high educational institutions from Mediterranean seashore. Spain (Complutense University of Madrid) -Po-, Portugal (Instituto Politécnico de Braganza) -P1-, Greece (Industrial and Business Education and Training Institute - SEV) -P2-, Turkey (Akdeniz University) -P3- and Italy (Universita Degli Studi della Basilicata) -P4-. This project will promote and reinforce the cooperation among these institutions and improve students and teacher’s internationalization. Long term benefits include a future workforce prepared to face the challenge of climate change, a more educated society on climate change issue more willing to support EU policies against climate change, strong cooperation between educational institutions with mutual recognition of qualifications and international teaching view.
Our main objective is to design a core subject on climate change that can be integrated into the curriculum of the institutions participating in the project, and that its contents remain open and available to any other European educational institution that wishes to include the subject in its programming to instruct its students on this topic. Our idea was to provide university lecturers from all over Europe with the basic tools so that they can implement in their faculties a subject that addresses climate change from a multidisciplinary perspective that includes not only scientific but also social aspects. To do so, we prepared a Teaching guide, following the template provided by the European Higher Education Area, a Methodological guide, with the description of several teaching methodologies that can be applied in this cross-cutting subject, and an on-line Community of Practice, that contains several resources related to different aspects of climate change and can be used by both students and professors.
As we argued in our proposal, climate change is the most challenging problem that our civilisation faces in the present time as it pervades the whole cross-section of our society. In the moment of application for the project (2019), there was a wide catalogue of scientific resources on climate change (web pages, on-line courses, documentaries, etc.). However, there was a notable lack of resources related to the adverse effects that climate change is producing in our society as a whole (including economy, social justice, energy, migration, health, etc). Our main objective was to contribute to the preparation of the undergraduate students to face the climate change challenge through a cross-cutting subject that approaches climate change not only from a scientific point of view, but also includes a social perspective. To achieve this goal, we assembled a diverse group of people from academic institutions located along the Mediterranean coast. The variety of academic backgrounds of the project members (History, Sciences, Journalism, Philosophy, Education, etc.) is the ideal breeding ground for such challenging task. In addition, partner countries are being greatly affected by all the problems related to climate change (see UN 2019).