Climate Leadership

URL study guide

https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2023-2024/A_HP006#/

Course Objective

Tackling the climate crisis is one of the largest societal challenges today. While the science on climate change and mitigation and adaptation strategies are clear, the response from society is often slow for various reasons. To overcome this deadlock, we need climate leadership and this course is centred around that. Leadership has to be based on sound scientific knowledge and should bridge fundamental science and social sciences. However, you will not only learn about the scientific background regarding repairing our climate but also be offered a more holistic and interdisciplinary approach to leadership. This means that you will learn what it means to be a leader, with the scientific

knowledge and understanding behind the current global crises.

The aims of this course therefore are:

Increase self-awareness through self-reflection
Broadening scientific knowledge regarding the climate crisis
Developing climate leader competencies
Develop multi-disciplinary skills by collaborating in group assignments with fellow students from different disciplines
Exploring creativeness combined with climate leadership

Course Content

The aim of this course is to help you take the first steps toward climate leadership. This is done by providing scientific knowledge about the climate crisis, inspirational masterclasses of climate leaders in their own field, and reflecting on leadership in interactive seminars. Moreover, you will also be challenged to enact climate leadership yourself in this course by working on a group project.



Climate or sustainability leadership is a type of leadership that aims to strive for (organizational) change whilst taking into account planetary and societal boundaries. Sustainability leadership is based on dialogue, inclusion, collaboration, and participation. This type of leadership requires particular skills and these include:

Systems thinking. Addressing climate issues requires understanding complex structures and seeing the interconnections between social and natural systems.
Collaboration. To effectively work on complex issues you need others to determine an effective approach. Sustainability leaders guide others in navigating this complexity by facilitating dialogue and collaborative sensemaking and decision-making processes.
Self-reflection. Sustainability leaders are self-reflective professionals, who are aware of the values that drive them and align their work with these values.


This course has three types of lectures. These are Lectures, Masterclasses, and Seminars. The lectures aim to teach you the basics of the climate crisis, leadership, and social systems change. During the masterclasses, we will invite climate leaders from society and invite a scientific leader to provide a scientific perspective. The masterclasses cover a wide range of areas in which climate leadership can be expressed. This includes Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s), Start-ups, Law, Activism, Geo-engineering, Art, and Government. The seminars will have a more open format in which we will reflect on the masterclasses and work on the group assignment.

Teaching Methods

Combination of seminars, lectures, masterclasses and excursions

Method of Assessment

Group assignment, presentation, self-reflection

Target Audience

Amsterdam honours students