October 2026 Blog Post: From PREFER to the classroom: Teaching existential risks at Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

This October marks the beginning of a new teaching initiative from Université de Versailles Saint Quentin, as part of Université Paris-Saclay, one that has grown, in part, out of the questions we have been exploring within PREFER.

A new specialisation, “Sortir de l’Anthropocène : Territoires menacés, Territoires en santé” (Beyond the Anthropocene: Threatened Territories, Healthy Territories), has opened within the second-year Master’s programme Anthropo-SSEnTS, part of the University’s Master’s degree in Sustainability Science.

The programme takes existential threats as one of its central concerns. Not only the global existential risks that have attracted increasing scientific and political attention, but also what PREFER calls Local Terminal Risks: threats to the continuity of communities, their ways of life, their values, and the worlds they inhabit.

In that sense, the new specialisation is something of an educational offshoot of PREFER. It takes questions emerging from our research and brings them into the classroom, where they will hopefully be challenged, discussed, and taken in directions we have not yet anticipated.

Existential risks, but from the ground up

Existential risk studies have developed largely around threats to humanity as a whole: nuclear war, pandemics, artificial intelligence, ecological collapse, and other potentially catastrophic developments. The field is now entering postgraduate education, notably through the University of Cambridge’s MPhil in Global Risk and Resilience.

Our approach is somewhat different.

What happens when a community faces the possible disappearance of the conditions that make its world meaningful and inhabitable? What exactly is threatened? Who decides what deserves preservation? And how can communities retain the capacity to define their own futures when facing threats that may be largely beyond their control?

These are questions familiar to the PREFER team through our work in Greenland, Vietnam, and Colombia, and also through other closely related work in California, the United Kingdom and in France. They now provide a starting point for teaching existential risks as lived, situated, and deeply political experiences.

The ambition is not to replace global existential risk studies with a local perspective, but to broaden the conversation. Existential threats are not necessarily experienced at the scale at which they are conventionally defined.

A common foundation, two complementary specialisations

The redesigned Anthropo-SSEnTS Master’s programme builds on more than fifteen years of teaching and research on environmental health, territories, and the relationships between human communities and their living environments.

Students follow a substantial common curriculum, shared by two specialisations: “Santé, Solidarités, Environnement” (Health, Solidarities and Environment) and Sortir de l’Anthropocène : Territoires menacés, Territoires en santé.”

This common foundation covers sustainability science, the ethical and epistemological dimensions of environmental challenges, transdisciplinary research and action, risk governance, environmental health controversies, emancipation, justice, and equity. It also addresses relations between humans and other living beings, the possibilities of inhabiting a shared planet, and the futures that might still be imagined and constructed.

Particular attention is given to the relationship between knowledge and action: how problems are defined, how different forms of expertise are brought together, how policies are evaluated, and how communities can participate in shaping responses to the challenges they face.

The existential threat specialisation builds on this foundation through more focused teaching on terminal threats, the habitability of territories, and the conditions under which communities can continue to inhabit their worlds. It brings together conceptual exploration, empirical cases, and reflection on possible interventions.

Teaching is closely connected to research, but also to practical experience, group work, and the development of students’ own professional or research projects.

Bringing research questions into teaching

For PREFER, this development is particularly welcome. Teaching offers a way of keeping the fundamental questions arising from PREFER alive. The teachings of the project are translated, in real time, into options for action.

The classroom is an interesting place for this. Students arrive with different disciplinary backgrounds, different experiences, and sometimes quite different understandings of what constitutes a threat, a desirable future, or a legitimate intervention.

We do not expect them simply to adopt PREFER’s conceptual framework. Quite the opposite. Concepts such as Local Terminal Risks, moral grammars, and habitability need to be examined critically, tested against other approaches, and possibly revised.

There is also a more practical ambition. If existential threats are not only about physical survival but also about the continuity of meaningful worlds, then the ways we diagnose problems, design interventions, and evaluate their consequences need to change.

A first step

The first courses are now getting underway. It is still early, and there will certainly be adjustments as the programme develops. But the underlying idea is fairly straightforward: existential risks deserve a place in sustainability education, not only as extreme scenarios concerning humanity’s distant future, but also as threats already being experienced by communities whose futures are becoming uncertain.

And perhaps, just as importantly, students should learn to ask not only what is at risk?, but also for whom, according to whom, and what might be done without taking away people’s capacity to define their own futures?

For us, this is a natural extension of the work undertaken within PREFER. Not another research output, strictly speaking, but another way of putting its questions to work.

Further information: M2 Anthropo-SSEnTS; Université Paris-Saclay