AnantU announces India’s first BTech programme in Climate Technologies

Ahmedabad-based Anant National University (AnantU) has announced the launch of India’s first BTech programme focusing on climate action, the varsity said in a statement recently.

The four-year undergraduate engineering degree, with a super-specialisation in Climate Technologies, offers students the chance to be a part of the USD 23 trillion climate industry, the statement from AnantU further read.

The techies pursuing this course will learn to use engineering tools and design thinking principles to create technology-driven solutions for climate change.

A climate lab in AnantU’s Ahmedabad campus will be equipped with the latest softwares for running climate simulations and various instruments and technical apparatus for weather measurements, solar radiations, studying and simulating PV systems, testing and set up of renewable energy sources, among others.

The curriculum of this BTech programme is designed in a way that semesters one to six offer an incremental step across eight climate technology streams – climate simulation, engineering mathematics, environmental engineering, climate chemistry, energy and technology, design thinking and behavioural science, technology and society, including research projects in the climate lab.

The final two semesters focus on specialisation and full industry immersion to ensure that students are placed within the climate industry, and guided by an academic guide and an industry expert.

To align academics with the Centre’s net-zero emissions goal for 2070, the job-oriented degree specialising in Climate Technologies prepares students to work in an industry where hardly anyone qualified and skilled for these new jobs.

Emphasising the need of the hour, it prepares students for positions in industries that need to mitigate climate impact, roles that require climate modelling, near-term climate analysis and predictions, positions in government agencies serving to make policy, and independent laboratories conducting climate research.

Commenting on the launch of the programme, Anunaya Chaubey, the provost at AnantU, said, “The reasons and implications of climate change in India and certain other emerging nations differ from those in the rest of the world. Thus, there is a need for a specialised climate studies programme that gives regional context. It is important to train students to find and implement solutions and develop technology to adapt to and mitigate climate change for India as well as other parts of the world”.

Miniya Chatterji, the founding director of Anant School for Climate Action and the CEO at Sustain Labs Paris, said, “Measuring, predicting, mitigating and adapting to climate change needs an influx of new technologies as well as millions of people skilled in the use of existing and new ones. We are glad to establish India’s first undergraduate degree related to climate as this will effectively move our country and the world closer to the goal of zero emission.”

AnantU’s incubation centre, Aarambh nurtures ideas into entrepreneurial ventures. The university’s unique one-year-long Anant Fellowship for Climate Action is a highly coveted and globally acclaimed programme for advanced practitioners in the field of climate action. It receives more than 5000 applications from over 50 countries for 20 seats each year.