Themes covered in this free course, Energy in buildings, include reducing heating demand in buildings, heating systems and fuel emissions, and reducing electricity use by appliances.
The course looks at the importance of energy in buildings in the UK, investigate heat loss and how to prevent it, ways of increasing building efficiency, decreasing CO2 emissions of different fuels and the use of efficient appliances.

Environment: treading lightly on the Earth focuses on the problem of greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide. This free course will give you an understanding of the nature and importance of carbon footprints of individuals and households. It will enable you to measure your own carbon footprint and explore what you could do to reduce that footprint and so ‘tread more lightly on the Earth’.

Human societies have to take urgent action to end their dependences on fossil fuels. We have to alter the whole path of our development and decision making in order to make our societies both environmentally adaptable and sustainable. This free course, Climate change, takes on the task of trying to chart some of the ways in which it might be possible.

Access to safe, clean and sustainable energy supplies is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity during the twenty-first century. This free course, Why sustainable energy matters, will survey the world's present energy systems and their sustainability problems, together with some of the possible solutions to those problems and how these might emerge in practice.

Climate crisis is one of the grand challenges we face as a society, but it can be hard to approach as a subject. Not only can the science at times seem dauntingly complex, but the solutions are also far from clear. This leaves many people feeling confused, guilty, anxious, angry, or else completely switched off from the subject.

This course tells the story of climate science in a new way, to find a fresh perspective for thinking about the future. It looks at the problem through the lens of climate engineering - the idea of deliberately trying to modify the climate, to counteract the changes we’re observing and predict what will happen in the future. The subject contains everything from hope – new technologies that could prevent the worst impacts of climate change – to enormous controversies over their risks and the way they could be used. More than that, climate engineering serves as a useful tool to move beyond the usual, often frustrating conversations around what to do about the climate crisis. By examining exactly what we want for our planet's climate, and what we would be willing to sacrifice to get there, we might find more clarity in our search for solutions.

We ask the question ‘Can renewable energy sources power the world?’ as a response to the growing awareness that increased use of renewable energy technologies is making a major contribution to global efforts to limit anthropogenic climate change.
The course begins by examining the environmental concerns that have caused a rise in interest in renewable energy, introducing the main sources and technologies, and describing global efforts to increase the share of renewables.
The course then looks at each of the principal renewable energy technologies and the contributions they might make to global energy demand.
Finally, several future energy scenarios are analysed to show how combinations of renewable energy sources and technologies could provide a major share of global energy needs.