Futures Literacy & Arts for Transformative Climate Action

Building on an exciting collaboration at Resilience Frontiers, on the success of a previous edition of this Futures Literacy course, the UNESCO Chair at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences and One Resilient Earth are offering once more a certified in-depth online course addressing the critical challenge of fostering transformative action in response to the climate emergency.

This course will enable students and professionals in the sustainability field, as well as individuals aspiring to dive into climate change challenges, to deepen their Futures Literacy skills so as to grow their own resilience and creativity. It will also provide practical advice and tools to mobilize Futures Literacy in professional contexts, and design transformative climate action.

Last, the course will build participants’ capacities to both innovate and embrace emergence, which are essential to designing and implementing impactful and regenerative initiatives today for a just, climate-positive, climate-resilient and biodiverse world.

Our target audience is students and professionals in the sustainability field, as well as individuals aspiring to dive into current climate change challenges. In case you would like to check if you are a good match for this course, feel free to contact us: [email protected].

The course will take place online from 2.00 to 6.30 pm CET from Tuesday 14 January to Thursday 16 January, 2025 and will be offered to a small group of climate-curious individuals, sustainability students and sustainability professionals. It will be interactive, participatory, iterative and tailored to the needs of participants.

In order to enrich our imagination regarding the future, deepen connection to ourselves, and unleash creativity, One Resilient Earth will mobilize artworks, with a focus on multimedia and installation arts.

'I found the overall experience to be very informative, engaging, and eye-opening. As someone who is passionate about reimagining the future and helping people engage with the future, this training was exactly what I was looking for. I would love to delve further into Futures Literacy and further engage with it in my personal and professional life. I would highly recommend this training to anyone and hope that I can bring it into everything that I do.'

'The training was immersive, providing an experiential introduction to futures literacy. This design created an experience of the process which then made theoretical exploration more meaningful. The facilitators held the process skilfully and displayed depth of understanding. The use of technology was excellent, with the Miro board providing a map of the overall process and means of collaboration in the learning process.The climate action focus was engaging and the arts angle added an interesting angle to consider ways of nudging systemic transformation.'

The course will enable participants to acquire an in-depth understanding of Futures Literacy, as a capability that facilitates the development of critical new skills to respond to the climate emergency. Futures Literacy will be taught through a Futures Literacy Lab on the future of climate action. The Lab will be informed by presentations of climate change projections and of recent trends in terms of climate action. Different climate scenarios and challenges identified will be discussed with the support of artworks through interactive sessions. The objectives of the course are to:

• Acquire an understanding of the Futures Literacy framework, and of different ways of mobilizing the future for transformative climate action;
• Adopt new approaches to building climate resilience, and embracing emergence in innovative climate-positive designs;
• Experiment with art as a channel for inner change and creativity growth.

We offer different fee categories to enable access and diversity in the group (click on ‘tickets’ for details). Participation in the different fee categories are capped, and we invite you to register early. All benefits made through this course support One Resilient Earth’s portfolio of regenerative activities.

In case you need a scholarship, cannot attend the course at this time, have any question and/or would like to hear about later opportunities, please follow our Eventbrite account and/or contact us: [email protected].

A survey proposed at the end of this course will help gather information for research activities undertaken by Hanze University. The contributions of all participants to the survey are welcome.

Three-month after the workshop, the teams at UNESCO Chair at Hanze University and One Resilient Earth will organize a follow-up group call to discuss different cases and scenarios shared by participants who have applied their newly acquired Futures Literacy skills in their workplace . This dialogue will provide an opportunity to deepen Futures Literacy skills, and to learn collectively from the experience of mobilizing Futures Literacy when designing and implementing climate action in the workplace.

Loes Damhof designs and develops courses in 21st Century Skills, Intercultural Competences and Global Citizenship at Hanze University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. She became a leading voice for Excellence & Talent Development programs and is a strong advocate internationally for Globally Networked Learning. She is a demanded public and keynote speaker on national and international conferences and a critical friend/consultant to the Dutch Ministry of Education

Loes Damhof has been elected Lecturer of the Year 2016 of all higher education in The Netherlands for her innovative practices and passion for teaching. She designs and facilitates learning spaces for students of all ages. In collaboration with UNESCO, she used her Comenius award for implementing Futures Literacy, the capability to use the future to rethink the present, as the essential competency for the next decade in higher ed. Her TED talk about Futures Literacy given at TEDxYouth Groningen in March 2022 can be viewed here.

In 2018 Loes and her team at Hanze got rewarded with a UNESCO Chair on Futures Literacy. In addition to her research and teaching practices, she consults and trains staff of international organizations such as FutureWomenX, UNESCO, UNFCCC, ClimateKIC, CIFS and Oxfam in multidisciplinary projects. As a Futures Literacy Expert, she designs, develops and facilitates so-called Futures Literacy Labs: collective intelligence knowledge creation processes across the globe that challenge and raise fundamental questions on gender equality, decolonization, migration, climate change and technology.

Her next project is The Emergence Academy; new school for new activism, that offers leaders who are young at heart an alternative learning environment that fosters a new, embracing attitude towards complexity and uncertainty.

Laureline Simon is the founder and director of One Resilient Earth, an international non-profit organization founded in 2020, which helps individuals and communities respond to the climate and environmental crises through a pioneering regenerative and transformative approach that brings together science, art, ancient wisdom and new technologies. To see the latest impact report of One Resilient Earth, click here.

Laureline has worked on climate change mitigation and adaptation at the international level since 2006. After supporting women-led reconstruction projects in Indian villages with the NGO SEWA , she worked on the financing of large climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation projects in South Asia with the French Development Agency, and subsequently led a multi-year research program on adaptation to climate change in cities of sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2016, she joined the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat where she coordinated activities related to knowledge management and stakeholder engagement. She supported international climate negotiations on adaptation to climate change, including the setting up the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples’ platform and work on Loss and Damage associated with adverse effects of climate change . In 2019, she co-designed and led Resilience Frontiers, a collective intelligence process on post-2030 climate resilience that brought together 80 visionaries and thought leaders from fields ranging from new technologies to basic needs provision.

Her TEDx talk about 'the first thing you need to do to address climate change' can be viewed here.

Loes and Laureline met through Resilience Frontiers in 2019, and have enjoyed collaborating since then. They recently published "What If Resilience Was About Welcoming Emergence Every Day", an article which can be read on Tero Magazine, as well as on Medium, and provides some insights into this training. They also collaborated recently on a Futures Literacy workshop on the Future of Healing in a Changing Climate for the Anchorage Museum where they successfully complemented the futures literacy training with artworks from the Anchorage Museum collection, as you can see here.

We look forward to meeting with you soon!

Photo credits: Marlen Stahlhuth, Sutirta Budiman, Frederik Falinski, Loes Damhof, Laureline Simon

Event Venue

Online