Global Environmental Leadership

Despite that environmental issues are typically multi-facet by nature, environmental education programs currently being offered in most countries are predominately monodisciplinary with primary emphasis on classroom learning. With concerted efforts of environmental, anthropology, public policy, culture and communication experts from six universities in Hong Kong, USA and Canada, we launched a multi-disciplinary education program incorporating science, socio-economic, politics and cultural dimensions in 2015. This programme provides a diverse suite of teaching and learning activities (including guided self-learning, experiential and service learning, role-play and brainstorming exercises and public engagement) to nurture students from participating universities as global environmental leaders to meet the challenges presented to us in coming decades. Observation, feedback and evaluation showed that this approach is highly successful and have a significant impact on student learning and development. They are not only able to tackle environmental issues using a holistic view built upon weight of evidence from science, socioeconomic, politics and cultural dimensions, but also able to develop their own ideas and effectively communicate them to stakeholders and general public.