Major grant to boost interdisciplinarity in the fight against the climate crisis

The climate crisis is one of the greatest and most complex challenges of our time, and it cannot be solved within a single discipline alone. It requires new ways of collaborating across fields – from natural sciences and technology to social sciences, law and the humanities.

This is why STRIVE U. is being launched, a nationwide initiative in which all Danish universities, together with the University of the Faroe Islands, are collaborating to strengthen the contribution of higher education to the green transition through increased interdisciplinarity. The University of Greenland may potentially become part of the collaboration in the future. The initiative is backed by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which, with a grant of DKK 95 million, provides a significant boost to the development of a more sustainable university sector.

“It is a unique opportunity to carry out important interdisciplinary activities that can otherwise be difficult to find the resources for in a busy day-to-day environment.”
This is according to Marianne Holmer, Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Southern Denmark and a member of the steering group.

“We are in a situation where the problems we need to solve reach across disciplines, but our degree programmes do not do so to the same extent,” Andreas Roepstorff adds. He is Director of the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies at Aarhus University and a driving force behind the writing group for STRIVE U.

New framework to unlock lecturers’ innovative capacity

The aim of STRIVE U. is to educate graduates who, from the outset of their studies, learn to work across disciplinary boundaries. The initiative will function as a platform where new teaching formats can be developed, tested and, over time, embedded within universities.

“STRIVE U. will become a development platform for cross-cutting educational activities within sustainable development, where we can test ideas and, hopefully, also embed them within universities,” says Andreas de Neergaard, Associate Dean for Education at SCIENCE, University of Copenhagen, and a member of the STRIVE U. steering group.

He emphasises that the collaboration should make it easier to develop new teaching courses by providing lecturers with better frameworks and resources. These resources are crucial to ensuring that interdisciplinary initiatives succeed in practice.

The initiative is structured around three key components, which together are intended to strengthen and develop the programmes needed to accelerate the green transition:

• “The Alliance” - a national collaboration between universities, where a joint steering group coordinates efforts, gathers experience and sets the direction for the development of sustainable, interdisciplinary education.
  
  
• “The Greenhouse” - a funding pool that supports concrete teaching projects in which lecturers and students can develop and test new interdisciplinary courses and forms of collaboration in practice.
  
  
• “The Pollinators’ Platform” - a learning and networking platform with courses and seminars that upskill staff and ensure that project experiences are shared and embedded across the entire university sector.

The collaboration is historic in its scale and enables universities to make use of one another’s strengths. Among other things, this allows institutions to draw on expertise they do not possess themselves and to share teaching solutions across institutions.

In the longer term, the ambition is that the best practices will be integrated into degree programmes, thereby transforming the way teaching is delivered across the entire university sector. The result should be graduates who possess both strong academic competences and the ability to collaborate across disciplines - a key competence in addressing climate and sustainability challenges.