UN CC:Learn

🏙️ Cities cover a small fraction of the planet's surface — yet they generate more than 70% of global CO₂ emissions.�

They're also where the damage lands first: heatwaves trapped between concrete, floods overwhelming drains built for another century, sea levels creeping toward homes and power stations.

That double role — biggest driver, most exposed — is what makes cities the most consequential place to act. And it's the subject of Cities and Climate Change from UN CC:Learn, taken by 42,000+ learners worldwide. Across six short lessons it covers how climate change hits urban areas, why cities contribute so much, and how planners can build adaptation and mitigation into transport, housing, energy, and water, with real examples of cities already doing it.

For planners and city officials, certainly. But also for anyone who lives in a city and wonders what it will feel like in twenty years.

📍 Short course · ~2 hours · English, Spanish & French
�👉 https://unccelearn.org/course/view.php?id=21

Cities and Climate Change This course offers digital certification. Join over 42,000 learners worldwide who have already taken this insightful course on cities and climate change. Explore how urban areas are both affected by and contribute to climate change and discover the transformative role cities can play in building a g...

🌍What does it actually take to scale climate finance?

Discover it on the free 𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 e-course, built by UNITAR and UNDP's Climate Finance Network.

We've just added a 5th module — Scaling Climate-Smart Public Investment Management — to the course!

Swipe through 👉 to see what's inside all 5 modules.

✅ Free & self-paced
✅ UN digital certificate available
✅ Already reached 2.4k learners in 180+ countries

Whether you work in a finance ministry, the private sector, or civil society, this course breaks down how climate finance actually moves, from sources and instruments, to public budgets, to project delivery on the ground.

Supported by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.

🔗 Learn more: https://unccelearn.org/course/view.php?id=205&page=overview

🌍 Every day between 2016 and 2021, weather-related disasters drove 20,000 children from their homes — 43 million in all.
(Source: UNICEF)

Nearly a billion more — almost half the world's children — are growing up in countries at extremely high climate risk. They didn't cause the crisis, but they're living its sharpest edge.

Children and Climate Change, from UN CC:Learn, puts them at the center of the story. Across five short lessons — already taken by 28,000+ learners worldwide — it shows how climate change shapes children's health, safety, and schooling, and how child-centered policies, resilient schools, and education can turn them from bystanders into agents of change.

Whether you teach, govern, build, or parent — this is for anyone with a stake in the world today's children will inherit.

📍 Short course · ~2 hours · English, Spanish, French & Vietnamese
👉 https://unccelearn.org/course/view.php?id=23

Built on UNICEF's data, including the Children's Climate Risk Index.

Children and Climate Change This course offers digital certification. Join over 28,000 learners worldwide who have already taken this eye-opening course on children and climate change. Discover how climate change affects children and youth, how to build their resilience, and how reducing greenhouse gas emissions benefits peopl...

🌡️ A heatwave settles over the city. The local clinic fills with an elderly man fighting for breath, a dehydrated child, and a farmer who couldn't work the fields.

None of them will ever sit in a climate negotiation. Yet the decisions made in those rooms will shape whether wards like this overflow again next summer.

Climate change is projected to cause roughly 250,000 additional deaths a year between 2030 and 2050, and health still too often reaches the negotiating table as a footnote.

Climate Change Negotiations and Health, from UN CC:Learn, is built to change that. Across six lessons, it links the science of climate and health to the machinery of the UNFCCC, the Paris Agreement, and the COPs, so the people who care about health can help shape what's decided.

For clinicians, negotiators, officials, and students alike — anyone who wants health to count in the climate conversation.

📍 Self-paced · English
👉 https://unccelearn.org/course/view.php?id=127

Developed with World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), & Climate Tracker, supported by the Global Climate and Health Alliance.

Climate Change Negotiations and Health This course offers digital certification. The course features key information on climate change and its impacts on human health, provides an overview of the climate change negotiations so far, and considers entry points to address health issues and priorities within climate change negotiations and p...

Follow a single mango from an orchard in Kenya's Rift Valley to a market stall in Nairobi. 🌍

How it's grown, packed, sold, eaten — and what's left to rot — touches soil, water, energy, livelihoods, and climate. Every step is a choice about how a continent consumes and produces.

That's the lens of Sustainable Consumption and Production in Africa, a self-paced course that traces sustainable consumption and production across five modules, from the factory floor to the shopping basket. It moves from cleaner production and climate-smart farming to eco-labelling, greener cities, and the policies and consumer choices that turn intention into lasting change.

The setting is Africa, but the lessons travel anywhere consumption meets production, for anyone working to change how we make, buy, and use things.

📍 Self-paced and available in English & French�👇
https://unccelearn.org/course/view.php?id=88&page=overview

UN Environment Programme United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR)

🌍 A fisher hauls in her nets at dawn. The catch is smaller than last year — and smaller than the year before.

Is that a poverty problem? An environmental one? A climate one?

The honest answer is all three, at once. As the mangroves are cleared and the coastline erodes, her catch shrinks and her income falls. As her income falls, she has little choice but to fish harder. The threads won't pull apart — yet we keep writing policies as if they do.

That knot is the whole subject of Introduction to Sustainable Development in Practice e-course. Its premise is simple: you can't solve poverty, environment, and climate in separate rooms. Across four modules and under two hours, you'll learn to see the connections — and find the openings where integrated policy can change the outcome.

You'll come away able to:
→ Read the poverty–environment nexus for what it really is
→ Spot the global and local forces pushing toward integration
→ Weigh the real trade-offs of tackling these issues together
→ Recognise where in the policy process integration takes hold

Grounded in real cases from more than 10 countries, and made for the policy staff, practitioners, and change-makers who'd rather untie the whole knot than tug at one thread.

👉 Start here: https://unccelearn.org/course/view.php?id=170

💡 Local communities aren't only on the front line of climate change, they're on the front line of the solution.

When local governments have the finance and the tools, adaptation gets real: climate risk built into local plans and budgets, and resilience delivered where people actually live. That's the idea behind the Local Climate Adaptive Living (LoCAL) facility — channelling climate finance directly to local authorities in developing countries, including least developed countries, small island states and across Africa, and embedding adaptation into local planning and budgeting in a participatory, gender-sensitive way. And local action goes even further when it's connected to the bigger picture: the decisions shaped in international negotiating rooms under the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement.

"International Climate Change Negotiations: Leveraging LoCAL Experience" on the UN CC:Learn platform connects the two. It builds a solid understanding of how climate negotiations actually work with a clear focus on adaptation. And it goes further than most: a full module on the fundamentals of negotiation: the strategies and tactics that make delegates effective in the room.

⏱️ Self-paced across 3 modules — around 3.5 hours — built around the schedule of full-time working professionals, with interactive lessons and a real-world case study on financing local adaptation. You'll come away able to:

✅ Explain how the UNFCCC provides a framework for international cooperation on climate change
✅ Understand the roles of its governance bodies and negotiating groups
✅ Explore the financial mechanisms available under the UNFCCC
✅ Examine key adaptation milestones — including the Paris Agreement and its non-market mechanisms
✅ Build practical negotiation skills and techniques for international climate conferences

Whether you're a national negotiator finding your feet, a practitioner who wants to understand the UNFCCC process, or simply curious about how countries shape climate outcomes, this course turns a complex system into something you can navigate — and influence.

Available in English and French, with a UN digital certificate on completion. Start here 👇

📚 https://unccelearn.org/course/view.php?id=159&page=overview

⚗️ Hazardous chemicals and pesticides cross borders every day in global trade. Shouldn't the countries receiving them get a say?

Decades of soaring chemical production and trade have raised real concerns about the risks hazardous chemicals and pesticides pose to people and ecosystems — and the countries least equipped to monitor what's coming in are often the most exposed. Adopted in 1998, the Rotterdam Convention answers that gap with a simple but powerful principle: prior informed consent. Before certain hazardous chemicals can be traded internationally, the importing country must know what's arriving and agree to receive it — a foundation of shared responsibility and cooperation to protect human health and the environment.

"A deep dive into the Rotterdam Convention" on the UN CC:Learn platform is exactly what its title promises. A practical "one-stop-shop" for the Convention's mechanisms and provisions, it walks you through how chemicals get listed, how the Prior Informed Consent (PIC) procedure works, and how the trade of listed chemicals is managed in practice — right down to completing an import response form step by step, and navigating key tools like the Resource Kit and the FAO Pesticide Registration Toolkit.

⏱️ Self-paced across 4 modules — around 5–6 hours — structured to fit around a full-time schedule, with each module built from focused lessons. You'll come away able to:

✅ Understand what the Rotterdam Convention is, why it was created, and how it relates to other agreements
✅ See how banned or severely restricted chemicals and hazardous pesticide formulations get listed
✅ Follow how the trade of listed (Annex III) chemicals works — from imports to exports
✅ Get to grips with the Prior Informed Consent procedure and the mechanisms for information exchange

Whether you're a designated national authority, work in customs or the chemicals trade, or simply want to understand how the world governs hazardous substances across borders, this course turns a complex legal framework into practical, usable knowledge.

🎓 Available in English, French and Spanish, with a UN digital certificate on completion. Start here 👇

📚 https://unccelearn.org/course/view.php?id=208&page=overview

🌍 The economic model that built the modern world is now breaking it.

Today's dominant model — fuelled by fossil energy, linear "take-make-waste" production, and growth at all costs — is driving climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and widening inequality. But a different vision is gaining momentum: economies reshaped around sustainability, equity and human well-being. An inclusive green economy isn't only a way to protect the planet, it's a chance to create decent jobs, address past injustices, and build more resilient societies.

That's the premise of "Reshaping Our Economies" on the UN CC:Learn platform. It situates you in this global shift and gets practical fast, showing how upstream economic policies (trade, fiscal, industrial, employment), fair transition strategies, and sustainable finance can move an entire economy toward green and inclusive transformation. Drawing on real-world examples from the United Nations Partnership for Action on Green Economy's 22 partner countries, it shows how governments, financial institutions, civil society and businesses can align economic, social and environmental goals in practice.

⏱️ Self-paced across 3 modules — around 4.5 hours — with short videos, interactive lessons, case studies and exercises, moving from economies in transition, to making that transition just, to financing it. You'll come away able to:

✅ Explain why upstream economic policies are powerful levers for sustainable development
✅ Identify enabling conditions and entry points for advancing green, circular and job-rich economies
✅ Outline tools and policies that unlock and redirect public and private finance
✅ Discuss the social impacts of a green transition — and how to protect vulnerable groups
✅ See what the transition looks like in practice, through real country examples

Whether you're a policymaker, work in finance, or represent business, labour or civil society, this course gives you the tools to help shape a fair, job-rich and sustainable economy.

Available in English, French and Spanish, with a UN digital certificate on completion. Start here 👇

📚 https://unccelearn.org/course/view.php?id=227&page=overview

Reshaping our Economies This course offers digital certification. Reshaping Our Economies is a self-paced e-learning course that explores how countries and institutions can drive the shift to an inclusive green economy—one that advances sustainability, equity, and well-being. Through videos, interactive lessons, case stu...

⚡ Climate change doesn't affect everyone equally — and neither does the transition to clean energy.

When we picture climate impacts, we think of droughts, storms and floods. But some of the most damaging effects are the quieter, secondary ones, and they fall hardest on those already facing inequality: women, youth, the elderly, persons with disabilities and minority groups. Intersecting social inequalities limit their ability to adapt, exclude them from decision-making at the household, community and national levels, and shut them out of the opportunities that low-emission, climate-resilient development creates — including in renewable energy, a sector with real potential to improve women's socio-economic wellbeing.

"Gender Equality and Human Rights in Climate Action and Renewable Energy" tackles this head-on. It maps the interlinkages between gender, human rights, climate change and renewable energy, then equips you with concrete tools to embed gender equality into renewable energy access and entrepreneurship, and to build gender-responsive, human rights-based approaches into climate mitigation and adaptation.

Self-paced across 3 modules — around 6 hours to complete — built from short lessons, case studies and exercises, with flexible learning pathways tailored either to renewable energy and finance professionals or to climate and green economy policymakers. You'll come away able to:

✅ Describe the nexus between gender equality, human rights, renewable energy and climate change
✅ Explain how gender-responsive, human rights-based climate action delivers economic, social and environmental benefits
✅ Identify entry points for gender and human rights in renewable energy and climate policy
✅ Select and apply practical tools for gender-responsive climate action
✅ Explore targeted opportunities for women — from renewable energy entrepreneurship to access to finance

Whether you're a policymaker, work in renewable energy or finance, or simply want to understand how climate action can be fairer and more effective, this course is for you.

Start learning now 📚 https://unccelearn.org/course/view.php?id=142&page=overview