The Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth will introduce a new interdisciplinary undergraduate major and minor in Climate and Sustainable Growth beginning in fall quarter 2025. Housed in the Physical Sciences Collegiate Division, the program will give students a climate-oriented foundation in economics, policy, and energy technologies.
After a sequence of seven foundational courses, students will have the option to choose between three specializations: Climate Science and Technology; Politics, Economics, and Society; or Finance.
The major owes its formulation to the same 2023 report that led to the launch of the Institute itself in October 2024. The report was composed by a faculty committee, chaired by Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics Michael Greenstone, tasked with assessing the University’s interests and obligations in the climate space. The report laid out a broad program to promote climate research and reduce institutional emissions. Greenstone now serves as the Institute’s founding director.
In his initial announcement of the Institute, University President Paul Alivisatos promised that “a number of education-based initiatives and programs will be developed to cut across many disciplines and research topics.”
The major has been in development for two years, answering what Greenstone described as “an insatiable demand” for new curricula on climate. In recent years, the University has seen an increasing number of majors in climate-related fields.
In the Division of Social Sciences, the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU) began offering both a major and minor of the same name in the fall of 2023, replacing the Environmental and Urban Studies major. Students majoring in public policy also have the opportunity to specialize in energy and environmental policy.
Universities around the country have similarly expanded their climate offerings. Vanderbilt University’s Climate Studies major, launched in 2022, aims to integrate coursework in the humanities and social sciences. The Columbia Climate School at Columbia University recently introduced master’s programs in Climate and Climate Finance, as well as Climate and Society.
The Climate and Sustainable Growth major proposes to take a holistic approach to climate that students might not find in a traditional curriculum. “We definitely have environmental science majors and lots of classes in law and policy fields focused on the area, but this brings all of those things together,” said Vaani Kapoor, a second-year in the College and member of the Energy and Climate Club.
Second-year Iris Badezet-Delory, a co-president of the club, explained the case for an interdisciplinary approach: “If you’re working on a technology that you think could help with the adaptation or mitigation aspect, great, but if you don’t know how to sell it to businessmen and show why it’s amazing, people are not going to invest in that.”
“If you’re not able to see the possible policy outcomes of your technology,” she continued, “it might not be widely adopted. If you’re working in finance, you’ve got to take both policy and tech considerations into mind when you’re making an investment decision. Same with public policy. Those three arenas really interconnect when you’re talking about climate and energy.”
The major will also offer opportunities to study abroad through a selection of September Term experiential courses intended to bring global perspectives into the curriculum.
Students travelling to destinations in rural India and sub-Saharan Africa will gain insight into how people live with relatively low levels of energy consumption, while others will spend the term in West Texas, where the booming oil and gas economy relies on fracking. Other groups visiting Wall Street or Washington, D.C. will have the opportunity to meet the investors and policymakers who shape decision-making surrounding climate.
In an interview with the Maroon, Greenstone said that he looks forward to students bringing the diverse understandings these experiences will provide back to the classroom. “Each of those groups are going to have very different perspectives, and what we want is students… to be able to hold those multiple competing perspectives in their head at once and try to make sense of them,” Greenstone said. “That’s what education is supposed to be. You take a bunch of complicated ideas, some of which seem to run in opposition to each other, and how do you make sense of them? How do you draw conclusions?”
Greenstone hopes that UChicago’s Climate and Sustainable Growth major will serve as a template for other institutions. “Just as the Chicago Principles for Free Expression have proved to be very influential in higher ed [and] in the world broadly, we aim for the same thing for the Chicago curriculum,” he said.
The major’s creators aim for students to emerge from the Climate and Sustainable Growth program well equipped to enter a growing niche for sustainability specialists in both the private and public sectors. Within the past five years, job prospects in corporate sustainability have been among the fastest growing in the country, with few candidates well-trained to step into those roles, Greenstone said.
Kapoor also highlighted the major’s pathway to more specialized career areas. “It’s going to create so many more opportunities for students… to get exposure to the field and matriculate out into working in the climate space rather than just general policy or general business areas,” she said.
At the same time, Greenstone emphasized the value of the curriculum in its own right as part of a broad liberal arts education, a priority which informed its development. “The University of Chicago is not a technical school, in that the deepest aim of education is to help students learn how to learn.… By taking this multi-dimensional, multi-faceted problem and getting people to develop the muscles in their brain to be able to see this problem in all of its glory and all of its complexity and reach conclusions for what they think is the right thing—that ‘learning how to learn’ is something that time will never take away.”
In the coming years, Greenstone anticipates the curriculum adapting not only as a result of student input but also as the field itself is reshaped by developing research. “We’re in the second or third inning of the climate challenge. It’s not going away,” he said. “There are projected to be high levels of CO2 emissions out into the indefinite future. In its own way, unfortunately, climate change is a growth business.”
Beyond the new major and minor, the Institute also hopes to apply the curriculum for a master’s program through the Harris School of Public Policy. The program would become available for the 2026–2027 academic year.
Student information sessions about the major are slated to take place in spring 2025.
