Climate change can be understood through data, models, economics and policy. But some lessons become clearer only when you experience the systems, people and places at the centre of the climate challenge.

Historically, in climate education, approaches to building literacy have often been rooted in theory. At the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth (The Institute), we are looking at it through an interdisciplinary lens, preparing future climate leaders to think like economists, engineers and scientists, but also like lawyers: to understand context, weigh competing interests and ask who is affected, who they are speaking to and where they are speaking from.

Here, field and real-world experiences become part of the classroom.

This is the thinking behind the September Term curriculum at ICSG, which places experiential learning at the centre of the curriculum, not as an add-on to theory, but as the experience that brings it together. Ideas that can seem separate on a page, like fossil fuel dependence, energy systems, policy choices and economic trade-offs, begin to connect when students encounter them in the places and communities where they are unfolding.

The idea builds on the Institute’s summer programmes in India. Each year, a cohort of students comes to India through the India Summer Fellows Program, spending up to three weeks between Ahmedabad University, the UChicago Center in Delhi, and other field and cultural locations, studying air pollution, energy transition, climate finance, water and urban vulnerabilities while meeting the researchers, policymakers and practitioners actually working on them. Arriving in an unfamiliar place forces its own kind of learning before the coursework even begins. The students  have to orient themselves first, figure out where they are, before they can figure out what they are looking at. What students carry home is not just knowledge. It is the beginning of an understanding that climate looks different depending on where you happen to be standing, and a habit of checking your own perspective before trusting it.

Advancing the concept of experiential learning, this year in September, the inaugural cohort of the Institute’s  September Term course was flagged off.  Drawn from the University of Chicago and the Harris School’s Master of Science in Climate and Energy Policy programme, students moved across very different places and perspectives, beginning in Midland, Texas, before travelling to New York and then Delhi. Each stop offered a different way of seeing the climate challenge.

In Texas, students encountered a community shaped by the fossil fuel industry and saw how the transition is experienced not simply as a question of emissions, but through jobs, communities and local economies. In New York, they met industry giants and private investors and encountered another set of perspectives on the transition and the role of markets and finances.

In Delhi, and beyond, these questions took on a different dimension as students explored how a country of India’s scale is navigating the climate challenge in practice. They met policymakers, businesses, academics and researchers, and travelled beyond the classroom to examine India’s energy systems and the realities of implementation on the ground, from discussions on the economics of the country’s energy mix and power-sector management to a rural field visit exploring rooftop solar, a 1 MW solar plant, microgrids, and the challenges of reducing distribution losses and electricity theft. They also engaged with the realities of air pollution and market-based environmental policy, seeing first-hand how the design of climate and energy solutions must respond to the institutional, economic and social contexts in which they are implemented.

Put together, the three locations gave the students something close to a 360-degree view of a single, sprawling problem. And it is telling that the view only came into focus once they had sat in Delhi traffic and breathed Delhi air.

The experience reinforced a central lesson of the programme: climate and sustainable growth cannot be understood through a single discipline or lens. An economist, engineer, lawyer, investor or community member may look at the same climate challenge and see very different problems and priorities. Understanding these challenges requires bringing those perspectives together, accounting for context and competing interests, and asking a fundamental question: who is affected, and how?

Students on this trip did not just study climate change. They stood in it, in three very different places, and let it complicate what they thought they already understood. They arrived in Delhi carrying Texas and New York with them, and they leave carrying Delhi too. What they take home is more than a set of case studies: a grounded sense of context, a sharper understanding of different perspectives, and an appreciation of the practical realities that shape climate decisions.

Their journey reflects the thinking behind the Chicago Curriculum on Climate and Sustainable Growth, which takes a 360-degree approach to understanding climate and growth by bringing together climate science, economics, politics, energy technologies, international perspectives, and climate impacts and adaptation. Experiential learning is an important part of this approach: taking students into different economic, social and policy contexts allows them to encounter the complexities and trade-offs that shape climate decisions beyond the classroom. This trip, and others like it, are therefore part of a broader effort to equip students with the interdisciplinary knowledge and real-world perspective needed to engage with climate and sustainable growth as the leaders, thinkers and entrepreneurs of the future.