Image generated with Google Gemini, prompt by Felix Ambros, September 2026

 Zuversicht: A German Word for What Happens After the Gloomy Part

by Felix Ambros

A student representing the European Commission defends the EU emissions trading system. Across the room, industry pushes back on the timeline, and an NGO calls the whole thing too slow while the judges take notes on whether the arguments held and the sources were any good.

That mock debate was my highlight of this year's EU-US Climate Change Mitigation Course, which Marie-Sophie Attems and I taught again at WU Vienna, made possible by the University of Illinois. It was also the moment the point of the course became visible: net zero is not a technical problem with one correct answer but rather a negotiation between actors who all have their fair interests, different incentives, and different information.

Students from more than ten nationalities across four continents sat in that room, and that changes the dynamics in a climate class. When a classmate explains what water scarcity looks like where she grew up, the abstraction disappears. Student Lars Winterfeld put it well: "Hearing firsthand experiences from classmates about how climate change affects their home countries made the topic much more tangible. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to climate mitigation."

We spent the semester on the difficult questions, discussing the scientific foundations of global warming, Climate Finance, Resource Scarcity, and limits to growth, then spent just as much time on solutions. The students ideated in a hackathon and wrote final papers on questions without clear answers: circularity in the EU textile sector, water scarcity and sustainable land use, degrowth in aviation, and mobilizing private capital for the green transition.

I hope and believe the effect goes beyond the classroom. Student Gwenny Geissler wrote, “After the semester I feel much more passionately about the importance of climate change mitigation. I’ve noticed myself seeing things discussed in class in real time. The real-world application of the class has been one of the most impactful things because I am much more aware of the state of the world in terms of climate change, and how important it is to be involved in the discourse around climate change. After this course, I’ve become very hopeful knowing that there are a lot of people interested in stopping climate change.”

Which brings me to the word I keep coming back to. Zuversicht is German and does not translate cleanly. It is not optimism, which assumes things will work out on their own. Zuversicht is the confidence of someone who looks at what is coming and knows they are equipped to handle it. A course full of gloomy topics, and the students still left with that. I did too.

I know that a single course does not fix anything but it was one of the few places where I felt real Zuversicht in the past months. Which leaves me with a question: In a field that mostly produces bad news: what gives you Zuversicht?