LoI selected a few 100% FREE sustainability online courses to help you understand sustainability, climate change, waste and social progress. Some of these courses can also guide you in making powerful changes in your everyday life and taking impactful actions to save the planet.
1. Introduction to Sustainability
This course introduces the academic approach of Sustainability and explores how today’s human societies can endure in the face of global change, ecosystem degradation and resource limitations. The course focuses on key knowledge areas of sustainability theory and practice, including population, ecosystems, global change, energy, agriculture, water, environmental economics and policy, ethics, and cultural history.
2. Our Earth: Its Climate, History, and Process
Develop a greater appreciation for how the air, water, land, and life formed and have interacted over the last 4.5 billion years.
3. Voices of Social Change
At a time of political unrest, environmental uncertainty, and lingering inequalities, young social change-makers are leading the way to counter the today’s challenges. What are you doing to create sustainable, positive change?
Voices of Social Change is a free online short course co-designed and delivered by eight young social entrepreneurs. Follow in the footsteps of these young change-makers who had an idea, a desire to make an impact, and converted that into real-world change. Today, they’re enhancing the lives of millions of people around the world.
4. Trust in Our Food: Understanding Food Supply Systems
You’ll explore the challenges and responsibilities of different people in the food system, including the role of the consumer. You will assess the information available to consumers relating to issues of food safety, nutrition and quality, sustainability of production methods and how these affect consumer trust. You’ll leave the course knowing more about where your food comes from and how you can make a difference in the food supply chain.
5. Greening the Economy: Sustainable Cities
This course explores sustainable cities as engines for greening the economy. We place cities in the context of sustainable urban transformation and climate change.
Sustainable urban transformation refers to structural transformation processes – multi-dimensional and radical change – that can effectively direct urban development towards ambitious sustainability and climate goals.
We connect the key trends of urbanization, decarbonisation and sustainability. We examine visions, experiments and innovations in urban areas. And we look at practices (what is happening in cities at present) and opportunities (what are the possibilities for cities going forwards into the future).
6. Principles of Sustainable Finance
Finance is widely seen as an obstacle to a better world. Principles of Sustainable Finance explains how the financial sector can be mobilized to counter this. Using finance as a means to achieve social goals we can divert the planet and its economy from its current path to a world that is sustainable for all.
Throughout this course, you will learn about the UN Sustainable Development Goals, how social and environmental factors should not be regarded as externalities, you will learn more about sustainable banking and asset management, about effective engagement, sustainable scenario analysis and long-term value creation.
7. Sustainability in Everyday Life
This course is organized into five key themes: chemicals, globalization, climate change, food and energy. These five themes represent challenges that people face day-to-day managing choices relating to sustainability.
8. Circular Economy - Sustainable Materials Management
This course looks at where important materials in products we use every day come from and how these materials can be used more efficiently, longer, and in closed loops. This is the aim of the Circular Economy, but it doesn’t happen on its own. It is the result of choices and strategies by suppliers, designers, businesses, policymakers and all of us as consumers.
9. Sustainable Fashion
In this course, we provide an overview of business model theory and discuss business models as essential tools in the transformation towards more sustainable businesses. Throughout the course, we will use business model theory as a foundation to look at how real-world fashion brands are adopting more sustainable ways of doing business. We will provide you with a rich opportunity to examine their efforts and consider strategies for your own organisation. Hopefully, you can also enlighten us with some local examples in your own countries for us to discover together new ways of dealing with sustainability.
10. Biodiversity and Conservation
In this course, you will learn about the variability among living organisms on the earth, including the variability within species and ecosystems. You will also learn how conservation helps to save life on Earth in all its forms and keep natural ecosystems functioning and healthy.
11. Becoming a changemaker: Introduction to Social Innovation
This free 6 -week course is for anyone who wants to make a difference. Whether you are already familiar with the field of social innovation or social entrepreneurship, working for an organization that wants to increase its social impact, or just starting out, this course will take you on a journey of exploring the complex problems that surround us and how to start thinking about solutions.
12. Our Energy Future
This course is designed to introduce you to the issues of energy in the 21st century – including food and fuels – which are inseparably linked – and will discuss energy production and utilization from the biology, engineering, economics, climate science, and social science perspectives.
13. Strategy and Sustainability
Business and environmental sustainability are not natural bedfellows. Business is about making money. Sustainability is about protecting the planet. Business is measured in months and quarters. Sustainability often requires significant short term costs to secure a sometimes uncertain long-term benefit. To some activists, all executives are exploitative, selfish one percenters. To some executives, all activists are irresponsible, unyielding extremists. This course promises to be both engaging and thought-provoking, aimed at anyone who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of a subject that is no longer perceived as a choice but a necessity for future managers and business leaders alike.
14. Climate Change Mitigation in Developing Countries
This course challenges you to consider how one might lift societies out of poverty while also mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. We explore the inherent complexity of developing country governments wanting to grow their economies in a climate friendly way. You will be introduced to an approach with which to address this challenge. The approach consists of a facilitated process whereby academic researchers and high-level influential actors within society co-produce knowledge. You will track this process in four Latin American countries – Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and South Africa. You will hear from various professionals about their contexts and the different challenges and opportunities the process includes.
15. Just Transition in Action
Just Transition is a framework developed to encompass a range of social interventions needed to secure workers’ rights and livelihoods when economies are shifting to sustainable production, primarily combating climate change and protecting biodiversity. It’s about leaving no one behind.
In this course you will learn what Just transition means, why it’s important and how we can achieve it.
16. How Climate Changes Art
Throughout history, art has helped reveal the climate around us and highlight our fragile relationship to it. In this course you will look at navigational charts from the Marshall Islands, Katsushika Hokusai’s “Under the Wave off Kanagawa”, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Hunters in the Snow”, Mali’s Great Mosque of Djenné, the Ise Shrine in Japan, steadily sinking Venice, the cave paintings of Lascaux, and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, among others.
17. Environmental Management & Ethics
In this course, you will analyze ethical challenges associated with environmental dilemmas and apply different decision making tools relevant to environmental management and regulation. You will learn to navigate through complex environmental, health and societal challenges pervaded by systemic uncertainty, ambiguity and ethical implications.
18. Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems: the Nexus between Water, Energy and Food
In this course you will become familiar with the ideas of the water-energy-food nexus and transdisciplinary thinking.
You will learn to see your community or country as a complex social-ecological system and to describe its water, energy and food metabolism in the form of a pattern, as well as to map the categories of social actors.
You will be provided with the tools to measure the nexus elements and to analyze them in a coherent way across scales and dimensions of analysis. In this way, your quantitative analysis will become useful for informed decision-making. You will be able to detect and quantify dependence on non-renewable resources and externalization of environmental problems to other societies and ecosystems (a popular ‘solution’ in the western world). Practical case studies, from both developed and developing countries, will help you evaluate the state-of-play of a given community or country and to evaluate possible solutions. Last but not least, you will learn to see pressing social-ecological issues, such as energy poverty, water scarcity and inequity, from a radically different perspective, and to question everything you’ve been told so far.
19. What is Climate Change?
In this course, learners will become familiar with the scientific evidence that demonstrates human-caused climate change. We will explore how greenhouse gases cause the Earth to warm, and why our recent warming is attributed to human activities. We will also discuss where our climate is headed, including anticipated future temperature, precipitation, and sea level. Learners will engage with the consequences of these changes on our ecosystems, infrastructure, and communities. We will also identify how political beliefs influence our attitudes about climate change, and apply that knowledge to become better climate communicators.
20. From Climate Science to Action
Each part of the world faces specific vulnerabilities to climate change and has different opportunities to mitigate the effects and build resilience in the 21st century. With the ratification of the Paris Agreement, many countries have acceded to act in combatting climate change. Indeed, without climate action, decades of sustainable development is at risk, thus making this a ‘make or break’ point in time. Showcasing the most recent scientific evidence, explaining the different regional impacts and divulging climate action strategies, along with interactive tools such as a Carbon Footprint Tracker and (I) NDC Platform, this MOOC provides some opportunities, where you can take action on climate change.
This action-oriented MOOC gives you the opportunity to learn about regional climate change impacts and sector-specific strategies to increase resilience and move towards a low-carbon future.
21. Why are nonhuman animals victims of harm?
In this free course, Why are nonhuman animals victims of harm? you will investigate why nonhuman animals tend to be overlooked as victims of violence. The course explores some of the social processes and structures that victimise other animals, such as ‘livestock’ farming. The course also highlights some of the environmental harms related to ‘livestock’ farming. You will learn about how harms are perpetuated by language and imagery, as well as how language and imagery can be used to oppose and resist harms against nonhuman animals.
22. Foundations of Diversity and Inclusion at Work
The summer of 2020 has brought issues of equity and race to the forefront of society. How do we create tolerant and just climates at work? Changing the culture of an organization is challenging in the best of circumstances; today, it can seem impossible. Yet, it is more necessary and urgent than ever to address these issues thoughtfully and with effective practices that can produce real change. Six Darden professors have designed this teach-out to bring you the latest scholarship and best practices on diversity, equity and inclusion and organizational change. You’ll learn how to identify and counteract inequity in organizations, how to build the business case for diversity and inclusion, and how managers can constructively address inequity. You’ll also learn how to promote the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion at work, how to have difficult conversations, and how to manage and lead change.
23. Waste management and environmentalism in China
This free course, Waste management and environmentalism in China, is an introduction to waste generation and waste management processes currently being practiced in China. This course explores how the Chinese can deal with increasing volumes of waste, drawing parallels with the UK experience of waste management. It also discusses the conceptual tools that can be used to make the cycle of material use, waste production and treatment more sustainable. The course ends with a brief examination of the growth of environmentalism in China.
24. Fashion and Sustainability: Understanding Luxury Fashion in a Changing World
How can we make fashion more sustainable?
Fashion is a global industry worth $2.4 trillion, employing around 50 million people, and is said to be one of the world’s most polluting industries.
Fashion has the power to make positive change, re-imagining currently damaging systems.
Get an introduction to sustainable fashion design, research and business practice, with this course from London College of Fashion’s Centre for Sustainable Fashion, supported by luxury fashion group Kering.
On this course, you’ll explore key sustainability issues, agendas and contexts associated with luxury fashion.
25. Fire ecology
This course explores the role of fire as a natural disturbance in ecosystems. It introduces the concept of a fire regime and its influence on the type and distribution of organisms that occur in fire prone ecosystems. It also looks at some of the adaptations of plants that have evolved in these ecosystems and how animals either avoid or exploit the consequences of fire as a natural disturbance. Finally it examines how fire can increase biodiversity by generating a mosaic of habitats within an ecosystem and briefly addresses some of the consequences of climate change and global warming on the intensity and frequency of fires.