High-profile environmental summits like the recent Paris climate conference (COP 21) offer an opportunity to incorporate real-world, timely issues into teaching and learning about global environmental governance. Using COP 21 as an example, this Forum article summarizes the ways that contemporary environmental summits can be incorporated into university-level education, providing content and context to help address the challenges of interdisciplinary sustainability education. Faculty members have incorporated COP-21-related content in ways ranging from traditional lectures and discussions to field trips, which have contributed to a broad range of course content and learning goals. However, the challenges of including environmental summits in educational settings include knowledge-based, normative, and structural barriers. While environmental summits can be an effective way to incorporate knowledge of global environmental governance into interdisciplinary education, more resources, experimentation, and extensions beyond climate change are needed.

With the eyes of the world on Paris in December 2015, the eyes of students were among them. For those of us who teach about global environmental politics, this presented both a challenge and an opportunity. Environmental summits offer high-profile examples of how cooperation and conflict about ways to address environmental challenges happen in real-world settings. The impact of high-profile events like COP 21 extends well beyond the academic community that traditionally studies environmental governance.

While experts in global environmental politics are often well-acquainted with the role and importance of summits, the issues addressed at summits are relevant to a much broader community of scholarship. Addressing large-scale, complex global environmental and sustainability problems like climate change requires mobilizing a broad range of expertise from across disciplines (Holdren 2008), including perspectives on global environmental governance. Future researchers and practitioners in a variety of disciplines need training and expertise that prepare them to integrate and apply different types of knowledge to real-world problems. Here, I examine whether environmental summits such as COP 21 can provide content and context to help address this interdisciplinary challenge in sustainability education. Drawing on my own experience incorporating environmental negotiations in classroom education, and on insights from colleagues through an online survey and personal interviews, I reflect on the ways in which faculty members at universities engaged with COP 21, lessons learned, and challenges ahead. I focus on university-level classroom settings (as opposed to educational activities for K–12 students, the general public, or education in other forms than traditional classes) in a broad range of disciplines. First, I summarize the varying ways in which faculty can incorporate environmental summits into education, and assess how this live, real-world content can affect educational outcomes. I then identify challenges and roadblocks to teaching and learning from summits in interdisciplinary settings, including knowledge-based, normative, and structural barriers. Finally, I conclude by recommending concrete ways forward for improved outcomes when incorporating environmental summits in multidisciplinary coursework.