Climate Labs: climate innovation laboratories in ten universities
Universities across Mexico, Colombia and Brazil set up applied research and climate innovation labs together with partners from France, Italy and Spain, co-funded by the European Commission's Erasmus+ programme.
What happens when a university stops studying climate change only through papers and opens a laboratory to act on it? That was the bet of Climate Labs, a project co-funded by the European Commission’s Erasmus+ programme, implemented between 2020 and 2023.
The core idea: strengthen the applied research and innovation capabilities of Latin American universities through Social Innovation Labs - laboratories installed inside the institutions, focused on climate change mitigation and adaptation with their own communities and territories.
Ten universities, two continents
Institutions from Mexico, Colombia and Brazil took part - among them the University of Guadalajara, Tecnológico de Monterrey, the University of Caldas and the Pontifical Catholic University of Pernambuco - working in consortium with European universities such as the Université de Lorraine, the University of Genoa and the University of Valencia. 2811 was part of the project’s management.
The Erasmus+ consortium format made possible what no institution could achieve alone: European funding for innovation infrastructure, methodologies shared across continents, and a peer network that remains active after the project’s close.
A laboratory that stays
Unlike a course or an event, a laboratory is infrastructure: when the project ended in 2023, the labs remained installed in the universities, with trained teams and their own applied climate research agendas.
That is the pattern we care about most: every collaboration should leave the institution with more capabilities than it had, not with dependence on whoever accompanied it.
This century’s challenges call for new capabilities, new alliances and new ways of teaching. Climate Labs shows how a consortium between Latin America and Europe builds all three at once.
More detail on the project at 2811global.com. Would your university like to join a consortium like this? Let’s talk.