Abstract:

As the years pass, the impacts of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions will be less easy to ignore while various ecosystems and regions will be struck hard or even destroyed by the consequences of it. Due to this, governments, higher education institutions and industries might be focused on innovating public policies, products and services as well as education for the survival of populations. Some of the issues might be how to feed people in cities with limited or broken supply chains, creating and maintaining a habitable environment under extreme weather, ensuring communication and transportation of goods between regions, educating migrants, creating and fabricating medicine for new pandemics and psychological disorders as well as trying to create new social contracts [1]. To note, this is not about the business opportunities of what a climate disaster may bring. It may seem so due to the way a company may rise on top with what it offers or a country may become a leader in an industry because it has the best conditions to survive. During the COVID-19 pandemic with the reduced outdoor activities and shopping, it was expected that there would be drastic changes in the functioning of the economic system; however, it has been found that businesses simply changed their direction in how to handle the pandemic. Clothing companies began to offer fashionable masks and shields while stores strengthened their online presence to ensure sales. Electronics sales shifted to ensure higher quality video calls and more efficient workflows with improved collaborative software. For a climate disaster, some companies might move to fabricate products that allow comfort for such a time. In this sense there might be new forms of clothing that can ensure comfort in very high or very low temperatures. There might be an increase in the installation and use of air conditioning everywhere. In case of mass migrations richer populations will have the priority of moving, just like in the present COVID-19 pandemic in which they hogged the vaccines. In this paper a few scenarios for higher education are created for such times using industrial engineering tools [2] and the results are used to propose new higher education learning-teaching methods and also to propose theme-specialized universities dedicated to educate for readiness for a world in extreme weather conditions based on the expertise and professional skills which will be needed.

References:
[1] A. Costas, “Un nuevo contrato social postpandémico. El papel de la economía social,” in Revista de economía pública, social y cooperativa, no. 100, pp. 11-29, 2020.
[2] N. Dominguez-Vergara, D. N. Dominguez-Perez, Quality control tools in the analysis of COVID-19 caused problems, END 2021 Proceedings, pp. 496-500, 2021.

Keywords:

Global warming, higher education, foresight, COVID-19.