SystemsChange.Now and Climate Education
Written by Gunta Krumina and Mikael Seppälä
The Toolshed meetup is Systems Change Finland’s event series which focuses on the tools and approaches that can be used in Systems Thinking and Systems Change. May’s meetup was organized in association with our global friends in the Systems Innovation network.
In May’s meetup on Thursday 6.5.2021 17:00–18:30 the discussion was ignited by Mikko Äijälä (LinkedIn), the University of Helsinki who is the teacher of the Systemschange.Now course which is part of the Finnish Climate University programme. Mikko Äijälä has a background in atmospheric sciences and currently works at the University of Helsinki as a project coordinator and post-doctoral researcher on the development of new climate and sustainability education. As a background material you can check Mikko’s previous presentation on Systems Thinking in Climate Change.
Climate change is one of the major wicked problems of today, and managing it requires new holistic, natural scientific, societal and educational approaches. Recently, Climate University has developed a new course “SystemsChange.Now” ,to help teach and learn some of the basics of systems thinking competence in a climate and sustainability context.
Mikko’s presentation was divided into two parts. The first part was on the Climate University and the SystemsChange.Now course, and the second was on the content of this course, namely Systems Thinking in Climate Change.
The after-part of the meetup brought up a vivid discussion about the role of climate education and systems thinking in creating tomorrow’s society that is ready and able to act on climate change. The climate education and systems thinking should become a must in teaching, but how long can we wait until this “future”? Can the current situation ensure society’s real ability to change and influence things on a big scale and as fast as we really need? It can’t wait for years until the future leaders are out of schools, getting decision makers’ positions and starting to implement the change.
One of conclusions and suggestions was that all of us from systems change community and network have a mission to be advocates for promoting systems thinking mindset right now. It would help the society to better see and understand the situation with climate change and its urgency, to prevent the ignorance of the general public and open doors for global solutions.
The full recording of the event is on YouTube and you can see it here:
You can find the slides from Mikko’s presentations here.
First part:
Second part:
Interested to learn more about Systems Change Finland and about how to join our community?
Systems Change Finland seeks to cultivate a society that can deal with systemic and complex challenges. The purpose of Systems Change Finland is to promote the application of approaches that help people, organizations and society understand and work with systems and complexity.
- Join the Systems Change Finland group on Facebook
- Follow @systemschangefi on Twitter
- Become a member and check our WWW-page at systemschange.fi
- Come work with us in our slack community
