Climate workshops, courses & training

We offer a selection climate awareness courses and workshops suitable for individuals, groups and organisations who want to learn about and tackle change. We also offer bespoke workshop design and professional facilitation to help you move from learning to thinking and strategic planning.

Click an image to learn more about some of the tools, techniques and methodologies that we use to help people understand the causes, consequences, solutions and opportunities of climate change.

Celemi Sustainability

Climate Fresk

Carbon Literacy Training

Carbon Literacy Training

Circular Economy

Circular Economy Toolkit

Participatory Strategic Planning

Technology of Participation (ToP)

Design Sprints

Climate Solutions & Policy

Design Sprints

Climate Action Simulation

Deep Time Walk

Deep Time Walk

Design Sprints

Custom-designed programmes

Design Sprints

Design Sprints

Celemi Sustainability

A passion for “learning by doing” using gamified simulations underpins this partnership between klimafit’s Suzanne Whitby and Celemi. The brand new Celemi Sustainability, released at the end of 2022, is a challenging, interactive and compelling business simulation on sustainability transformation for organisations.

This full-day facilitated workshop is designed to help participants take “ah hah” moments from the simulation and apply them to identify opportunities for sustainable change within organisations.

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This workshop can be run as a standalone experience, however we’ve found that it’s useful to make sure that everyone understands the systemic challenges that climate change poses first. We recommend running a Climate Fresk workshop to get people thinking, followed by Celemi Sustainability, as you can then be certain that everyone in the room understands the causes and consequences of a warming world – for people, planet AND businesses.

We’ve also found that after people have participated in Celemi Sustainability, they are motivated to start making a difference. We can follow-up a Celemi Sustainability workshop with focus groups, idea-generation workshops, design sprints, and strategic sessions with your sustainability and CSR team or your executive team. This will allow you to harness the ideas and energy of your team and start making shift happen.

Climate Fresk

Get everyone in your organisation on the “same page” when it comes to the causes of climate change and they can use their knowledge in their role to help you shift towards a sustainable, thriving future.

This half-day interactive workshop has a unique “head, heart and hands” structure and helps people to make sense of climate change, see the big picture, and catalyse conversations and future thinking.

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Using a pack of cards based on the latest IPCC data, teams work together in small groups to visualise the story of climate change. In two short hours, participants will deepen their understanding of the inter-connectedness of the problem without having to read 4,000 (and counting!) pages of scientific reports. Part experiential learning and part team-building, this workshop is the perfect way to make sure that all of your people understand how they and your organisation are affected by a warming planet, and how they and your organisation can be part of the shift to a sustainable future.

This workshop:

  • enables teams to make sense of the chains of cause and effect within the climate-human system using a card-based game
  • sparks collaborative learning and problem-solving
  • creates a creative space to discuss climate impacts and solutions

Use this workshop to start the conversation about in-house sustainability initiatives, as part of your on-boarding process, or as part of a larger series of workshops to take people from understanding the climate science, to connecting the challenges with your organisation, to identifying risks and opportunities to help you thrive in changing times.

Carbon Literacy Training

Carbon Literacy Training

Carbon literacy is “an awareness of the carbon dioxide costs and impacts of everyday activities, and the ability and motivation to reduce emissions, on an individual, community and organisational basis” (Carbon Literacy Project).

The Carbon Literacy Project was set up to give everyone, everywhere, a day of training on carbon literacy, so that they can start making shifts to help us move towards a sustainable future.  Businesses and individuals taking part in our accredited Carbon Literacy training programme can expect to emerge upskilled and motivated to reduce their carbon impact both at work and in their personal lives.

Each individual trained is certified Carbon Literate by the Carbon Literacy Project, and for organisations committed to reducing carbon and becoming carbon neutral or aiming for Net Zero, an organisational accreditation system exists, too.

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This workshop lasts one full day (in person) or takes place over three 3-hour online sessions (recommended). It couples bite-sized chunks of theory with individual and group activities and lots of discussion to give participants the opportunity to make their own connections and embed learning.

Our standard course covers topics that include:

  • The Why, What and How of carbon and climate change
  • Greenhouse gases, and their relationship to weather and climate
  • How climate change is likely to affect us in the UK and globally
  • Key terminology, including – net zero; carbon neutral; carbon footprinting, and offsetting
  • What we are already doing – national policy and local action
  • Scopes 1, 2 and 3
  • Understanding our impact: Energy; buildings; travel; food and the circular economy
  • Motivating others to act – employee engagement
  • Next steps – making a pledge; setting targets; tools; offsetting; resources.

This training can be customised for your organisation, building in information about your existing sustainability initiatives, carbon usage, and future plans to focus people on your strategic direction. We can also couple this workshop with a Climate Fresk experience, and follow up with tailored focus groups, ideation and strategic planning sessions.

Circular Economy

Circular Economy Toolkit

We offer a variety of training programmes, interactive workshops and seminar-style sessions to bring everyone in your organisation up to speed on what “circular” means and how to to integrate circular economy strategies into all phases of your organization’s offerings.

There are typically three phases, one or more of which may be suitable for your group and your needs.

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Understand: your group will increase their understanding of the circular economy, its principles, circular economy opportunities in each step of the supply chain with circular economy case studies for each step and for your sector of interest. 

Unpick: participants work together to identify risks and opportunities, unpicking how your organisation does things now and how it can do things in a more circular way in the future. As part of this exercise, we can incorporate design sprints, voting sessions, and activities to help you narrow down the best ideas so that you can focus on the future.

Strategise: you get the right people into the room and we’ll help you plan strategically for a future in which “circular” plays a significant role. We’ll look at where you’ve been, where you want to get to, barriers, resources and of course, vision and actions.

Carbon Literacy Training

Climate Solutions & Policy

The En-ROADS Climate Workshop is an interactive experience which helps build support for strategies to address climate change through the use of the En-ROADS Climate Simulator.

This experiential workshop is hopeful, scientifically-grounded, action-oriented, and eye-opening. It works best when participants have some initial understanding of climate change, and we recommend preceding this workshop with our Climate Fresk or Climate Competence offerings.

This workshop takes 90 minutes online, and can also be delivered on-side as a 2-hour interactive session. 

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The workshop has been run for the U.S. Congress, Statnet in Norway, a community group in Atlanta, the Energy Transition Forum in London, HSBC bank, the U.S. Climate Action Network, the UN Secretary-General’s Office, and many others. Participants at GreenBiz 2020 rated it the best session of the conference (learn more about En-ROADS use in the business sector).

Co-developed with the MIT Sustainability Initiative, the workshop is set up as an interactive group learning experience that promotes greater understanding of the causes of climate change and the solutions essential to mitigating it. It is framed by the En-ROADS simulator, which allows participants to explore and rapidly assess the impacts of different solutions to climate change—like energy supply subsidies, energy efficiency, or land use changes. The workshop is designed to be run by anyone dedicated enough to learn its facilitation, and can be run both in-person and online.

Participatory Strategic Planning

Technology of Participation: focused conversations, consensus-building, and strategic planning

We use powerful methods from the Technology of Participation (ToP) to structure effective group conversations, help groups make decisions, and provide a clear and practical framework for planning strategically for the future.

ToP methods were developed by The Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA), a leader over the past five decades in promoting lasting positive change in organizations and communities around the world. The methods themselves were crafted over 20 years of global action-research efforts exploring group decision-making and collaborative governance, and ToP’s deep philosophical roots go beyond “tips and tricks” to empower profound and lasting transformation.

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We use ToP methods in almost all of our work. They guide the questions that we ask when designing new programmes and workshops, and provide structure when decision-making or a strategic plan are the key outcomes of a facilitated session.

Aside from their efficacy, one of the things that we love about these methods is their versatility: they work well with both large and small groups, and are just as effective in a large room as they are in a virtual setting with participants located in different towns, cities or continents.

Whilst focused conversations are useful in all our workshops, consensus workshops are useful after programmes designed to generate ideas or spot opportunities as they help a group to narrow down their options. Our participatory strategic planning workshops shine when used with executive teams and heads of department who have gathered information from across the company as well as from external sources, and and want to use that to define new directions and actions to create a sustainable future.

Carbon Literacy Training

Climate Action Simulation

The Climate Action Simulation is a highly interactive, role-playing game for groups of 20-50 people to explore the different stakeholders and solutions that need to come together to take action on climate change. It is framed by the En-ROADS simulator, which allows participants to rapidly assess the impacts of different solutions to climate change—like energy supply subsidies, energy efficiency, or land use changes.

The game is conducted as a simulated emergency climate summit organized by the United Nations to establish a concrete plan to limit global warming by bringing together government, business, and civil society representatives. This game is a fun format for large groups to explore climate change solutions and see what it would really take to address this global challenge.

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The Climate Action Simulation enables participants to gain insights into the factors that affect climate change and what the solutions and possible paths are for equitably and effectively addressing climate change and achieving the international climate goals. A recent publication by Dr. Rooney-Varga of UMass Lowell shows that taking part in the Climate Action Simulation improves participants’ knowledge of the actions needed to address climate change, boosts both personal and emotional engagement with climate issues, and leaves participants feeling empowered to address climate change.

The Climate Action Simulation was co-developed by Climate Interactive, the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and the UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative and is offered by klimatfit as part of it’s climate competency learning experiences.

Design Sprints

Design Sprints

Rapidly-changing times mean that organisations and teams need to innovate quickly and creatively if they want to create the products, features, services and processes that will help them thrive and grow in the face of today’s sustainability challenges.

One way that we help organisations and teams accelerate innovation and the development of new ideas is by running a design sprint.

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Originally developed by Google, the design sprint is a framework that allows small teams to map out challenges, explore solutions, pick the best ones, create a prototype and test it. It’s an intense process that uses design thinking and it’s one that demands engagement from everyone in the team. A design sprint results in one or more prototypes of products, features, services or internal tools that you can then test with customers to decide whether further research and investment is wise or if a different direction is needed.

Design sprints typically last 5 full days. They can either be delivered as standalone workshops. They can also form part of a longer programme that starts with understanding broad climate-related challenges (Climate Fresk), then develops a deeper knowledge of organisational risks (Celemi Sustainability), then tackles communication style challenges (Tetramap), and ends with consensus building and strategic planning (ToP methods).

Deep Time Walk

Deep Time Walk

A Deep Time Walk is a transformative journey through 4.6bn years of Earth history via a 4.6km guided walk. It is an invitation to view the world differently and we use it to get people out of the office, into nature, and into a dialogue about the role of humans in today’s environmental and climate-related disruption.

This facilitated walk tells the Earth’s story, as we know it as present, and allows ideas and discussions to emerge throughout. It’s a good entry point for curious individuals, and for groups, it’s a great way to kick-start and more structured thinking around sustainability, risks and opportunities, and what you need to do in order to shift towards a future that is thriving AND sustainable.

The Deep Time Walk emerged from the amalgamation of two projects: The Walk Through Time, created in California in 1997 and the Deep Time Walk created at Schumacher College, and it is a powerful experience that encourages “thinking differently”.

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Get in touch

If you’re curious about how you can make shift happen and how we can help on your journey, we’d love to hear from you.

Book a free, 30-minute exploration session to brainstorm some ideas, or get in touch with us in a way that suits you.

Tel: +43 660 378 2939 • Email: hi@makeshifthappen.eu

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