On Friday, 15 October, ISET and the German Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) jointly hosted an expert digital workshop on Implementing climate change-topics in higher education in Georgia: experiences, needs, and potential for future collaboration.

Climate change has lately been attracting growing societal and political attention, but it has also been gaining traction as a topic within academic programs. For instance, several pilot programs implementing climate-related classes are already underway in Georgia, including the Climate Change Economics class in ISET's own BA program. However, many of these programs still lag far behind the potential and the country’s needs.

Consequently, we have encouraged representatives from Georgian universities, student organizations, various ministries, businesses, and civil society organizations to initiate an exchange about the existing programs and to begin to foster greater collaboration.

The current digital workshop was launched by Tamar Sulukhia (ISET director), Maia Tskhvaradze (the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture), and Nino Gogebashvili (GIZ). From the nine core presentations, Michael Lüken (a visiting ISET professor) went on to highlight the concept behind our Climate Change Economics BA class, and also acted as the workshop moderator.