How interdisciplinary teaching becomes climate action
Penn graduate students are learning that net zero is a systems challenge requiring fluency across disciplines, and why interdisciplinary teaching is climate action—including how it builds the human capital the clean energy transition demands.
2 min. read
In Penn‘s fall semester graduate course ENMG 5400: Clean Energy Deployment to Achieve Net Zero with Jennifer Wilcox, 35 students from Penn Engineering, the Wharton School, the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, the School of Arts & Sciences, and Penn Carey Law worked in interdisciplinary teams to analyze 10 industrial decarbonization projects—spanning steel, cement, glass, chemicals, copper recycling, and food manufacturing. Their work illustrates why teaching is climate action—and how building human capital accelerates real-world impact.
Thousands of companies have committed to net-zero targets, with many following the Science-Based Targets initiative and developing detailed plans for Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. Throughout the semester, the course centered on the question that now defines the net-zero transition: how do these plans move into practice? The answer is clear—achieving net zero depends not only on technologies, but also on people, systems, and interdisciplinary fluency.
The goal is to understand what it really takes to decarbonize hard-to-abate sectors from multiple lenses. Students’ analyses affirmed the idea that teaching is not peripheral to climate action; it is climate action. The work builds not only knowledge but the human capital needed for this decisive decade.
Students began by grounding themselves in the engineering fundamentals of each project. The more difficult questions emerged when students examined the full system surrounding each project. They discovered that a project’s location can reshape its risk profile—shifting technical, financial, and social conditions even when the technology stays the same. Financial analyses revealed how project economics can make or break deployment. Teams saw that a single shift in policy or funding could alter a project’s viability overnight.
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