Manmade climate change becomes a hot topic for every student in France

All university degree courses in France will have to include instruction on climate transition under a new government plan.

French President Emmanuel Macron attends a meeting with climate experts at the Elysee palace in Paris.

All university degree courses in France will have to include instruction on climate transition under a government plan that began on Monday.

Experts have started drawing up a “common base of knowledge and skills on ecological transition”.

The move comes after students at some of the grandes ecoles, the elite specialised universities, protested last spring over disciplines that they said were destroying the planet or doing nothing to stop the damage.

Graduating students at AgroParisTech, a selective training school, and HEC Paris, a venerable business school, started a national movement by denouncing programmes that they said prepared them to join polluting professions.

Anne-Fleur Goll, 25, said in her speech at the HEC graduation ceremony: “I have felt deep unease, becoming aware that the careers that my studies were leading to were the main cause of the environmental collapse.”

Lola Keraron told the ceremony at AgroParisTech that she would turn her back on the agribusiness for which she had trained. “We don’t want to pretend to be proud and deserving of a diploma for studies that have pushed us to take part in social and ecological devastation,” she said.

A local resident walks past the closed building of the School of Chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, eastern France, on January 5, 2023.

In 2015 the government announced plans to raise awareness of climate change across the country’s 75 universities and its grandes ecoles, but progress has been slow. Only 11 universities have qualified for a “sustainable development and social responsibility” label.

The government is awaiting the outcome of three advisory commissions before detailing its plans. Campaigners want radical measures, including the integration of climate science as a central element in all disciplines rather than as supplementary instruction.

Michel Lussault, a geography and urban studies professor at Lyons university, said the realisation that humankind had become the main cause of climate change marked a turning point in education. The new era “must bring a relaunch of all our sciences and our classical education”, he said.

The move is supported by university administrators and teachers, although some commentators see the shift as a reflection of what Le Point, a conservative news magazine, called a “nihilist fever” that is sweeping France.

The Times