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Lead climate action and research
This Master’s Programme is focused on understanding, assessing, and acting on the challenge of climate change and its manifestation across India’s rural–urban continuum. It covers the following set of themes:
This Master’s Programme has two distinct parts. The first roots the study of climate change in broader climate science, its subsequent impacts and response pathways. Using the analytical frame of systems transitions, it focuses on assessing multiple enabling conditions such as multi-level governance, institutional capacity, finance, policy instruments, behaviour change, and technology and innovation. It does so to ensure that climate change is understood as part of a broader set of multiple urban and rural systems, with clear linkages to development outcomes and prospects, and that learners have a foundational and interdisciplinary understanding within which to locate climate change.
It then equips graduates in the theoretical foundations of thinking about the response to climate change, as a transition and transformation process towards more inclusive societies, cities, and connected rural areas. Graduates will be able to understand core approaches to tackle climate challenges, with an emphasis on vulnerability and risk reduction, and climate-resilient development.
This Master’s Programme focuses on theory as well as policy, programmes, and practice. Graduates will be equipped with a core understanding of policies and programmatic interventions within climate action in India, and trained to design and implement interventions and programmes defined by the complex reality of Indian cities, linked rural areas and settlements. This is done through multiple modes of applied, case-based, and experiential learning built on a foundation of taught theory courses. The final component of the Programme is rigorous training in interdisciplinary methods of research and practice, as well as specific training in advanced methods in the study of climate change.
The Master of Science in Climate Change Science and Practice is a two-year, interdisciplinary, full-time degree programme. Each academic year consists of three terms of around 11–13 weeks each.
Core Courses are undertaken in the first year, where an interdisciplinary foundation locates climate change within broader urban and rural systems, and across multiple sectors such as energy, land and ecosystems, and the built environment.
The second year is composed of Elective Courses that allow learners to concentrate in different themes within climate change, such as climate change and systems transitions, including expertise on finance, economics, governance, and policy. The second year ends with an independent internship, project and/or dissertation.
Foundation Courses focused on holistic and integral personal development, run through both years. It is this framing of Foundation, Core, and Elective Courses that allows the University to pedagogically achieve interdisciplinary knowledge in a transformative manner.
The Foundation Courses are a set of learning experiences, interactions, and credit courses grounded in Indian culture and experiential contexts including local and traditional knowledge. These will help build a set of personal and professional capacities through experiential learning outside conventional classroom settings and enable the learner to imbibe a set of sensibilities and capacities grounded in the values enshrined in the Indian Constitution.
Foundation Courses facilitate holistic human development and integral learning engagement with the importance of being situated, committed and empathetic while handling situations outside one’s comfort zone and dealing with situations of conflict underscored. Some of the skills, abilities, and sensibilities that learners will be exposed to include Physical Culture, Art and Labour, Nature and Environment, Self-Awareness and Reflection, and Philosophical Orientation and Ethics.
Year 1, Terms 1 and 2: In the first two terms, learners take three kinds of Core Courses that are required for all Master’s programmes at the University. These are Core Theory Courses, Core Methods Courses, and Core Practica. These courses lay the interdisciplinary foundation across a set of urban systems and help learners see the process of urbanisation through social, economic, spatial, governance, infrastructural, and ecological lenses. They also establish competency in core skills and methods, including qualitative, quantitative, geospatial, and mixed methods; and expose learners to place- and field-based applied learning.
Core Practica is a field-based applied learning course, where theoretical concepts learnt in the classrooms are applied on field through learning-by-doing. Based in neighbourhoods of Bengaluru, learners first learn how to observe, document, and analyse different aspects of an urban neighbourhood. They then move to propositions, suggesting solutions to problems they observe and identify.
Year 1, Term 3: Learners start specialising in the specific themes of this programme in the third term. Through a set of required courses, the third term introduces learners to the foundation of climate change science, climate impacts, vulnerability, adaptation, and climate mitigation. These will be located in the context of ongoing global and regional changes, international policy responses, climate-induced impacts in India across the urban–rural continuum, and India’s mitigation pathways within the global context.
Year 2, Terms 4 and 5: Learners choose from various interdisciplinary Elective Courses offered in this programme. These allow in-depth learning in climate science, from key systems and system transitions to policy and governance, climate finance, and climate-resilient development. Learners may also take up to two Elective Courses from other Master’s programmes offered by the University. Additionally, they pursue skill enhancement Electives rooted in climate and environmental studies, as well as more inter-sectoral skills, methods, and practices.
Year 2, Term 6: This term is focused on learning through doing. Through an external internship with an organisation working with climate science, learners will apply what they have learnt and transition into post-graduation employment pathways. Learners can also choose to be part of IIHS teams working on ongoing projects and/or do independent research dissertations, mentored by faculty.
The Master of Science in Climate Change Science and Practice programme welcomes candidates from diverse academic and professional backgrounds who are passionate about addressing the urgent challenges of climate change. The Programme will equip them with the expertise to drive change in policy, practice, and research to create impactful, just, and scalable solutions for a more climate-resilient future.
Graduates of the Master of Science in Climate Change Science and Practice will have a wide range of career options:
