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Free online course addresses climate action

A free online climate-change course released Thursday through the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions says it is aimed at helping politicians and policy-makers steer clear of creating devastating warming by the end of the century.

A free online climate-change course released Thursday through the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions says it is aimed at helping politicians and policy-makers steer clear of creating devastating warming by the end of the century.

Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, a consortium of B.C.’s four leading research universities, said the course — Mitigation Needs and Action and Government Tools and Initiatives — is a practical resource written in layman’s terms and delivered in a dynamic way.

Tom Pedersen, executive director of the institute, said society is on track to creating an additional four degrees of warming by the end of the century, due to increasing heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. The manifestations of that will include the increased intensity of extreme weather events.

“If urgent action is taken, there is still time to prevent this from happening — and the new online course explains how,” Pedersen said. “Our challenge is to get the word out that it’s available and free to the entire planet.”

The course, which takes about 2.5 hours to complete, is targeted at the B.C. civil service and residents, but is also a resource for all three levels of government and hopefully will have international uptake, Pedersen said.

The course aims to explain to governments and policy-makers: the existing climate-change challenge issues; the possible solutions and adaptations; the available tools to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while generating new wealth and health; and the success stories, Pedersen said.

And for the average citizen, the course explains the difference between a carbon tax and cap-and-trade policies, he said.

“We want a better educated society and better educated bureacracy to understand there are real postives here,” Pedersen said.

“This is a postive view of the future that suggests nice do-able pathways that we can adopt to make things better.”

The first PICS online course, called Climate Science Basics, was launched by then-environment minister Terry Lake in August 2011. The target audience was the B.C. civil service, but it exceeded that and has been accessed by more than 150 countries, Pedersen said.

“People around the world have discovered it and they are making use of it in various places,” he said.

The course had more than 20,000 views and Pedersen said it’s being used in education in Ghana, has been translated into Finnish and translations have been requested by China and Germany.

A third course will follow in the late spring, Pedersen said.

You can view the course at: pics.uvic.ca

charnett@timescolonist.com