Top 10 universities for climate change research

23 Jul 2014

Heading off to university soon and looking to change the world?  A number of universities are leading the way in climate change solutions and we've compiled a list to help in your search for the right school.
We think this approach can help with the online research process by filling some information gaps.  Although there are rankings systems from QS, Times Higher Education and the Guardian with quite sophisticated methodologies they don’t specifically focus on climate change solutions, which can often cross multiple departments. There is this list published by the Aspen Institute but it is focused on MBA programs and also takes a broader look at social and environmental stewardship.
Our approach is straightforward; we've created our list by combining the information from a number of published rankings with that in Decarboni.se. We just used a simple count of the number of resources that mention or are published by the school across all the content on Decarboni.se. The result lists out the top schools bringing about decarbonisation. The scope goes across renewables, carbon capture and storage, energy efficiency and nuclear in subjects such as engineering, policy and law, economics and finance.
There are certainly some issues with our approach, namely (1) it is biased towards certain countries as we have a lot more English content on our platform than other languages (2) it’s more weighted towards carbon capture and storage as we have more content on that technology (3) all mentions of the university received equal rankings as opposed to a weighting based on relevance and (4) it has some bias towards universities that we've done a lot of work with such as University College London.  We've tried to help correct these issues by also listing our notable performers which might not have as a high of score but which we qualitatively observed to have some very good work underway or were just off the top ten list.  The notable universities are grouped into five regions: the Americas, Asia, Europe, Middle East / Africa and Oceania.
The final thing we noted is that many of the world’s top universities are becoming more easily accessible through MOOCs (massively open online curriculums) which can be taken from anywhere in the world for a fraction of the costs.  We've listed a few on the final page.
Hope you find the list useful