Climate change MOOC to aid developing nations

Research communication is crucial to ensuring that the global South and developing nations are adequately represented in discussions of the impact of climate change.

The Mitigation Action Plans and Scenarios (MAPS) Programme is an initiative of UCT’s Energy Research Centre, together with SouthSouthNorth, a Cape Town-based climate change NGO. MAPS provides development pathway scenarios by encouraging knowledge producers such as climate change researchers, and knowledge consumers such as government and industry, to work together in co-producing the knowledge which informs climate change policy.

The free online course Climate Change Mitigation in Developing Countries is a major output of the MAPS Programme. It was developed by Professor Harald Winkler and his colleagues from MAPS, and has been running on Coursera since November 2015.

The course explores the challenges faced by developing country governments wanting to grow their economies in a climate friendly way, and addresses the complexity inherent in lifting societies out of poverty while also mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.

The course is open for enrolment and a new run of the course starts every eight weeks.