Climate workshops, courses & training

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).