At the start of this academic year, Exeter’s prestigious MBA programme – 1st in the UK for sustainability, and 10th globally – welcomed its 2025/26 student cohort with an experience designed to challenge, inspire, and empower: the Climate Fresk.
Climate Fresk is a participatory workshop that’s empowering millions across the globe to take part in high-impact climate action. Turning the best available climate science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) into an engaging card-based team game, Climate Fresk deepens participants’ understanding of the climate change system and its social and economic implications – encouraging system thinking and collaborative problem-solving.
“The Climate Fresk workshop was a great opportunity to understand how different factors are connected to each other. Working as a team was also very valuable because we all had different thoughts, and that’s really where the learning happens. It made me realise how important it is to be aware of all the factors in the chain, because when we make a decision, we don’t just affect the direct element involved but the whole ecosystem around it.”
– José Antonio Gordillo Camacho, The Exeter MBA student
MBA students’ diverse cultural and industry backgrounds enriched the conversations with international perspectives and lived experiences of climate and ecological crisis. The three-hours interactive session did not only develop students’ climate literacy and futures skills, but it also allowed them to explore climate emotions and to discuss solutions – boosting confidence and sense of agency.
Whether they came from medical careers or tech corporates, charity organisations or finance, the 25 MBA students also reflected on what they can do to model sustainable leadership in their personal lives and careers, each leaving with clear ideas to bring forward:
- Educating clients on sustainable products
- Stop printing (going paper-less)
- Saving energy through better insulation and ventilation systems
- Pack their own lunch with reusable containers and cutlery
- Adopting models of social entrepreneurship, where part of the profit goes to support environmental projects.
“The Climate Fresk is an eye-opener and a must-do exercise for every sustainability practitioner and everybody. It shows, very clearly, how planetary life and humanity are dangerously going into extinction through direct and sometimes indirect human activities, even though deemed necessary. It was a sober and reflective session that birthed the realization that we all have a part to play in protecting the planet; we only need to start.”
Nkem Okafor, The Exeter MBA student
If you are interested to know more about the Climate Fresk or bringing it to your students or team, get in touch with Sara Agbenro (s.a.m.agbenro@exeter.ac.uk).