Sustainability in action at Ecole Polytechnique: season 1, episode 1
École Polytechnique is launching the first season of a series of mini-videos dedicated to its achievements in promoting sustainability in its major missions of education, research and innovation, as well as in the operation and modernization of its campus.
This first season, which includes eight episodes, illustrates the actions taken by the School, its students, lecturers, staff and entrepreneurs from its innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem to promote sustainable development.
Its first episode is devoted to an audio tour of the campus, offered to Polytechnique engineering students as an introduction to a new multi-disciplinary course on sustainability.
Led by Céline Guivarch, an economist, climate change specialist at École des Ponts and writer for the IPCC, this 40-hour college course, entitled “Engineering Sustainability”, is aimed at second-year students of the Cycle Ingénieur Polytechnicien Program.
“The course is part of the School's Climate Plan, which was decided in 2022 in its education section to give students the knowledge and skills to be engineers involved in environmental transformations,” emphasizes Céline Guivarch.
Designed with the contribution of eight teaching and research departments at the École polytechnique, specializing in complementary scientific disciplines, the course is structured around lectures combined with group work modules.
Designed to be interdisciplinary, it covers a wide range of topics from biodiversity to climate, and combines physics, mechanics, chemistry and biology with history, economics and management.
Its aim is to give École Polytechnique’s students a systemic vision of the major challenges of environmental transition - not just energy and climate change, but also social, industrial and demographic challenges.
“Sustainable development is all about the economy, climate, biodiversity and energy. That's why eight of us (teacher-researchers) got together. We were all aware of the importance of the problem and the need to tackle it through an interdisciplinary approach”, emphasized Manuel Dorion-Soulié, historian and member of the Languages and Cultures department at École Polytechnique.
A pedagogical innovation, the audio tour of the campus enables students to relate their everyday environment to global issues.
“In this walk, we use the different facets of the campus to raise the initial questions on which the various sessions of the course will be based,” explains Céline Guivarch.
“It's a way of showing that rising to the challenges of sustainable development requires individual and collective commitment,” she continues.
“If there's one message to take away, it's that the situation is serious, but that we can act, we can change direction, and that this requires individual and collective transformation and an interdisciplinary approach,” sums up Céline Guivarch.