Educational activities
Education and engagement with students are at the core of our activities, and the Centre has become a resource for education at KTH. Responses from students have been very positive, with our activities often being overbooked, and many students asking how to engage with and support the Centre.
We invite all KTH students to participate in our open seminars, competitions and mentorship sessions. Our events always have a clear connection to climate action and the SDGs, ranging from discussions about climate policies with climate politicians, renewable energy with organisations like IEA, or climate action on a grassroot level with civil society via Right Livelihood. Our students come to the centre to meet KTH researchers, politicians and policymakers, civil society organisations, and other students who are interested in climate action.
Students get in contact with the KTH Climate Action Centre from the beginning of their studies with many joining our reception activities at the start of the semester. We have a yearly challenge-based competition for students to support solving real-world climate issues. Also, since 2022 we have created a PhD course. Activities at the centre are a complement to the sustainable development courses that are ongoing at KTH. Our events are catered to the students' schedules with subjects that interest them, which means that they are fully booked and always lead to discussions afterwards in the centre.
Our physical space has become a place where students can come to learn and discuss. We have also sought out different programs at KTH, and programs that do not specifically have names that contain “environment” or “energy”, since we want all students to think more about sustainability throughout their whole education, like the sustainable development courses at KTH.
Regularly Occurring Events
Over the past two years of student events, we have had many organisations and people come and visit the centre to talk to KTH students with a range of themes. Below are three examples of events that regularly take place at the centre.
1. Climate Politics in Action
The first example is our longest running recurring series, Climate Politics in Action. Here, our students can listen to and discuss with policymakers, political advisors and journalists working with climate action. We have had politicians from municipal level to EU-level come and talk to our students, providing a different perspective and deeper understanding for climate action in society.
2. Seminar Series with Right Livelihood
The second example is another seminar series with civil society and researchers, planned together with Right Livelihood. These seminars have been a combination of climate action presentations by global grassroot movements, with KTH researchers presenting their climate action research and connecting it to the work being done all over the world.
3. Mentorship Sessions
The third example of event series is where the centre has become a facilitator when students want advice and opportunities for more climate action in their education through our mentorship sessions.They have consisted of sessions with researchers at KTH either giving advice on possible future academic work or discussing possible thesis projects related to climate action. Since 2023 the Centre manages a scholarship fund for Sveriges Ingenjörer, giving out ten 50.000 SEK scholarships to students excelling in addressing climate and sustainability topics in their thesis work.
The discussions held at our open seminars are from all levels of society, creating more nuance around the climate issue, which is very important to us as we work multidisciplinarily with climate action. The students attending is also a mix of national and international students, as well as both women and men attending and speaking at the events.