UN CC:Learn

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

🏟️ The climate crisis is changing the game — literally.

Sport and climate change are locked in a two-way relationship: sporting events, infrastructure and logistics generate greenhouse gas emissions — while rising temperatures, extreme weather and environmental degradation increasingly disrupt sport itself.

In 2018, UN Climate Change launched the Sports for Climate Action Framework to unite the sporting world around this challenge. This course is part of that effort: "Introduction to Sports for Climate Action" on the UN CC:Learn platform, developed by the UN Climate Change's Sports for Climate Action initiative in technical collaboration with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) with financial support from adidas.

⏱️ Self-paced across 4 interactive modules — around 1.5 hours — with videos, exercises and practical resources, taking you from the role of sport in climate action through to the power of sport to inspire change. You'll come away able to:

✅ Outline how sport both contributes to and is affected by climate change
✅ Explain what's at stake, and how climate change affects different people and communities
✅ Discuss strategies across the sports world that can lead to positive change
✅ Identify individual actions to make sport greener and more resilient

Whether you're a sports professional, a decision-maker, or simply a fan, this is your entry point to a low-emission, climate-resilient future in sport.

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

📚 https://unccelearn.org/course/view.php?id=214&page=overview

🍽️ The food we waste costs us all — our wallets, our environment, and the people who go without.

And it happens at every stage of the food chain: in manufacturing, in shops and supermarkets, in restaurants, and in our own kitchens. The good news? Every one of those stages is also a chance to prevent it.

That's the premise of "Food Waste Prevention", taught by a panel of international experts and country specialists from Brazil, China, South Africa and Sweden.

⏱️ Self-paced across 5 modules — around 5 hours — following food from factory to fork. You'll come away able to:

✅ Explain how much food is wasted each year, and its impact on people, the environment and the economy
✅ Define the role you and other stakeholders play in preventing it
✅ Identify ways to measure and account for food waste at each stage of the chain
✅ Describe effective measures to prevent it — and to minimise it where prevention isn't possible

By spreading this knowledge, the course contributes directly to Sustainable Development Goal 12.3: halving global food waste by 2030.

Whether you work in manufacturing, retail or food service, or simply want to waste less at home, there's something here for you.

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

📚 https://unccelearn.org/course/view.php?id=129&page=overview

Food Waste Prevention This course offers digital certification. The course aims to raise awareness and build capacities for effective food waste prevention at different stages of the food chain, including processing and manufacturing, retail, restaurants and other food services, as well as households.

📱 The device you're reading this on will, one day, become e-waste. What happens to it next is partly up to you.

The way we generate and dispose of electronics raises real concerns for human health, the environment, and the scarce resources locked inside our devices that are lost when they're simply thrown away. Resources we don't yet have good substitutes for.

But this course leads with a more hopeful question: Can you imagine a world without e-waste? What would it look like, and how do we get there?

"How to prevent e-waste?" takes a citizen's approach to exactly that. A collaboration between UN CC:Learn and the Sustainable Cycles (SCYCLE) Programme at UNITAR, it's designed to inspire as much as to educate, daring learners to co-create a better tomorrow through individual and joint action.

⏱️ Self-paced across 5 modules — around 2 hours to complete, following the path to a zero e-waste society. You'll come away able to:

✅ Understand what electronic waste is and the diverse impacts it has
✅ See the roles that individuals, companies and authorities each play in reducing it
✅ Identify how consumers can support circularity — including by influencing industry players and lawmakers
✅ Explore individual and community actions to tackle e-waste, from recycling to reuse, repair and reduction

You don't need to work in the sector to make a difference here. If you own a device, this course is for you.

🎓 A UN digital certificate is available on completion. Start here 👇

📚 https://unccelearn.org/course/view.php?id=143&page=overview

🌫️ Air pollution causes an estimated 7 million deaths every year — and it doesn't stop at national borders.

Pollutants from traffic, industry and agriculture travel over long distances, across countries and continents. Which means no single nation can fix the problem alone — cleaner air depends on working together, across sectors and boundaries.

That's the story behind the "Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution" course on our platform. It explores how UNECE member States have cooperated since 1979 through the Convention and its protocols — one of the longest-standing international frameworks for cleaner air.

⏱️ Self-paced across 4 modules — around 3.5 hours — you'll come away able to:

✅ Identify the key air pollutants, their sources and their effects
✅ Recall the measures that prevent and reduce harmful emissions
✅ Recognise the value of the Convention as a framework for international cooperation
✅ Understand the basic principles, obligations, stakeholders and processes under the Convention and its protocols

Whether you work in government, an intergovernmental or non-governmental organisation, the private sector, or academia, it equips you to contribute to — and help drive forward — action on cleaner air.

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

📚 https://unccelearn.org/course/view.php?id=150&page=overview