The Oxford programme building interdisciplinary skills for the future

It’s a Tuesday evening, almost halfway through the 2024/25 academic year, and a few hundred Oxford undergraduates have filled a lecture hall to hear two of the University’s world-leading academics discuss one of the most pressing questions of our time: ‘What are the solutions to climate change?’.

The lecture, delivered by Dr Radhika Khosla, Associate Professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and Programme Leader in Zero Carbon Energy Use at Oxford’s ZERO Institute, and Nathalie Seddon, Professor of Biodiversity and Founding Director of the Nature-based Solutions Initiative, is just one of a series of keynote lectures delivered as part of ‘The Vice-Chancellor's Colloquium: Climate’. In this lecture, the academics tackle the climate crisis through concepts like net zero and nature-based solutions, while discussing the challenge of growing energy demand for cooling in relation to extreme heat.

Launched in 2024, the eight-week interdisciplinary programme was created by Oxford’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Irene Tracey, to address the gap between humanities, social sciences and STEM subjects. It encourages Oxford’s students to build cross-curricular skills through lectures that bring together different perspectives on the same topic, as well as workshops facilitated by doctoral students.

The Vice-Chancellor, who attended the event, said she was ‘delighted to see the enthusiasm’ of students from across the University and all disciplines. Addressing the lecture hall, she said, ‘I know there's a lot of anxiety around climate, but it really is a problem that we can fix if we are bold enough and innovative enough.’

Taking to the stage first, Dr Khosla presented to students on what she believes is a ‘blind spot’ in our thinking about climate change; every year extreme heat kills more people than any other climate change induced extreme weather event, yet an Oxford study found that none of the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or their 169 targets, include the words ‘heat’, ‘cool’, or ‘thermal’. Rising in its intensity, frequency, and duration, it is an issue now affecting countries even with temperate climates such as the UK, where in 2022 temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius for the first time.

So, the future growth of energy consumption for cooling is an important concern. The global demand for air conditioning is considerable, currently accounting for 20% of energy use worldwide. The International Energy Agency predicts an ‘equivalent’ of ten new air conditioning units will be sold every second for next 30 years; ‘By the middle of the century we’re going to need air conditioning that it equivalent to all the energy that the United States, Europe and Japan use today.’

How do we provide thermal comfort for everybody but with zero greenhouse gases? That’s the conundrum, says Dr Khosla, and one that she and colleagues at Oxford have been working on, in collaboration with the UN. The result has been to model a solution that incorporates action on a global, city, building and individual level, incorporating multiple levers of change.

Passive cooling solutions are one of those levers; residential building design that incorporates such solutions as shading, ventilation and building orientation can prevent heat building up in the built environment and reduce the need for air conditioning; the reduction from passive cooling measures is about 25%.

Another is higher energy efficiency of air conditioners through improved technology, as well as a drive to decarbonise the grid. ‘One of the gifts of cooling,’ says Dr Khosla, ‘is that it's based-on electricity, and that opens up a lot of options, because electricity can be green.’ The refrigerant gas used in many air conditioning systems also needs to be quickly phased out. All this is needed alongside the appropriate governance, policies, regulations and laws to tackle the climate crisis.

‘Dealing with climate change and extreme heat is daunting. It can be challenging to think about whether we can we do this or not’. For those students not convinced, Dr Khosla points to a black and white photograph of the New York Easter day parade in 1900, showing a street lined with horse driven carriages. A decade later, a photograph of that same street has captured a socio-technical tipping point - the street is filled with motorised vehicles, heralding a change not only in technology but in society itself. In regard to the climate crisis, ‘we are constantly looking for those tipping points’, says Dr Khosla.

How to adapt to and reduce the impacts of climate change in a warming world is also one of the focuses of Professor Seddon’s Nature-based Solutions Initiative in Oxford, which brings together evidence demonstrating the benefits of nature-based solutions. There is a growing consensus around the global mitigation potential of nature-based solutions on the land of around 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year, equivalent to a reduction of heating by 0.3 degrees C.

The term ‘nature-based solutions’ has gained traction in recent years, but it’s often misunderstood, and at risk of misuse by a growing number of companies pledging to invest in nature as way of meeting net zero targets. Professor Seddon puts it plainly; ‘We need to do a reality check’. Short-term, isolated, carbon-focused projects, such as mono-culture tree-plantations or off-set schemes, are not nature-based solutions.

Instead, nature-based solutions represent a holistic suite of approaches built on the knowledge that healthy flourishing biodiverse ecosystems support our society and economy. ‘Put simply,’ Professor Seddon says, ‘nature-based solutions involve working with nature to address a range of societal goals but in a way that provides benefit to local communities and biodiversity.’

They also recognise that biodiversity loss and climate change share some of the same drivers, for example industrial agriculture on land is the biggest driver of biodiversity loss and also generates 23 percent of our global greenhouse gas emissions; ‘So, in theory we can tackle one solution, while also addressing the other.’

‘It’s clear that nature is a real ally to us in the face of the impacts of climate change’, says Professor Seddon. Protecting our habitats, grasslands, forests, and wetlands can secure and regulate water supplies, and shield infrastructure, communities and agriculture from flood erosion, landslides and damage from increasingly extreme weather systems.

There are plenty of examples of successful nature-based solutions. In Sierra Leone, cocoa agroforestry projects have been introduced in some areas. Here, crops are grown among the trees and trees among crops at a lower cost than conventional production, saving 500,000 tonnes of carbon a year, improving local livelihoods, and avoiding deforestation and biodiversity loss.

Recent work by Oxford’s researchers has highlighted the importance of nature-based solutions to tropical nations in particular, who cannot meet their targets under the Paris agreement without investing in measures such as halting deforestation and restoring degraded land. In Brazil these actions alone will help the country meet 80% of its net zero goal.

But the scale of the challenge is considerable, and nature-based solutions must happen alongside the decarbonisation of our energy systems and the introduction of ambitious climate policies to achieve their mitigation potential. According to Professor Seddon, it requires a fundamental shift in our thinking and values. ‘Our economic system is actively investing in its own demise’, she says, by prioritising profit over planetary health. Every year over $7 trillion continues to be spent on environmentally harmful investments, such as in fossil fuels and industrial agriculture; ‘our house is on fire and we’re still pouring fuel on the flames.’

The Vice-Chancellor's Colloquium | Oxford University Department for Continuing Education.