LSE100A      Half Unit
The LSE Course: How can we transform our climate futures?

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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LSE100 is LSE’s flagship interdisciplinary course taken by all first-year undergraduate students as part of your degree programme. The course is designed to build your capacity to tackle multidimensional problems through research-rich education, and provides you with unique opportunities to examine global challenges in collaboration with peers from other departments and leading academics from across the School. Before registering at LSE, you will have the opportunity to select one of three themes to focus on during LSE100, each of which foregrounds a complex and pressing question facing social scientists. In 2025/26, the available themes are: 

• How can we transform our climate futures? 

• How can we control AI? 

• How can we create a fair society? 

In the ‘How can we transform our climate futures?’ theme, you will investigate how social scientific research can underpin our response to climate change. Envisioning a better climate future requires rethinking the social, economic and political systems governing our planet. How can we benefit from green technologies while addressing the huge environmental impact of tools like ChatGPT? Is it possible to drive economic growth sustainably, or do we need new alternatives to capitalism?   

Global climate negotiations are gridlocked, but meaningful change is needed now. How will the social sciences drive a better future? This module explores questions of agency, responsibility, and solidarity to better understand the complex social, political and economic systems that combine to threaten the future of our environment.  

Throughout LSE100, you will investigate how systems are being transformed by a changing climate as you consider how we might tackle the challenges that lie ahead. You will learn to use the tools and frameworks of systems thinking to analyse the impacts of environmental degradation, broaden your intellectual experience, and deepen your understanding of your own discipline as you test theories, evidence and ideas from different disciplinary perspectives. 

7.5 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.
7.5 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

90-minute seminars take place in alternate weeks. Students will attend an LSE100 seminar in either weeks 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 or weeks 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 of Autumn Term, and weeks 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 or weeks 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 of Winter Term.

In addition to seminars students will engage with bespoke video lectures featuring academics from across the School (approx. 20 minutes per seminar).

In seminars throughout both terms, students will practice:

1. analysing quantitative and qualitative data
2. using systems thinking and systems change tools
3. constructing and communicating evidence-based academic arguments

Teachers will provide feedback during seminars and in post-seminar communications to groups and individuals.

During the Winter Term, groups will have the opportunity to submit and receive formative feedback on a project brief, summarising their research project. Students will also try out the tools of systems thinking and systems change that they will use in their summative group research project.

The following readings are indicative of the texts students will be assigned. The total amount of reading assigned for each seminar will be a maximum of 20 pages.

• Jason Hickel (2021) Less is More: how degrowth will save the world (London: Penguin Random House)
• Elinor Ostrom (2008). ‘Tragedy of the commons', in Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume (eds.) The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition.
• Kate Ervine (2012). ‘The politics and practice of carbon offsetting: Silencing dissent', New Political Science, 34(1), pp.1-20.
• Camila Moreno, Daniel Speich Chasse & Lili Fuhr (2016). Carbon Metrics: global abstractions and ecological epistemicide (Heinrich Boll Stiftung: Publication Series Ecology, Vol.42).
• Jessie Kindig (ed.) (2022). Property Will Cost Us the Earth: Direct Action and the Future of the Global Climate Movement. (London: Verso)
• Naomi Klein (2014). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, (London: Allen Lane)
• Murray, A., Skene, K. & Haynes, K. (2017). ‘The Circular Economy: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Concept and Application in a Global Context’. J Bus Ethics, 140, 369–380.
• Walter R. Stahel (2016). ‘The circular economy’. Nature 531, 435–438.
• Oran R. Young (2017). ‘The age of complexity’ in Governing Complex Systems: Social Capital for the Anthropocene (MIT Press)

Critical evaluation (50%, 1000 words)

Project (50%, 3000 words)