Navigating Climate Change and the Rising Seas: A Spring FSP Field Trip to Remember

"We're going where?!", the students asked incredulously as they continued to zoom in on Google Maps. We—the two faculty co-directors of the "Green City" Foreign-Study Program—had just shared the details about our upcoming multi-day excursion with the group. The "Green City" FSP is based in Berlin and run jointly by the Department of German Studies and the Thayer School of Engineering. It enables students to combine coursework in environmental engineering and German while experiencing sustainability as a lived practice, mediated through the lens of another language and culture. The multi-day excursion is always a program highlight, but the 2024 iteration made for a particularly memorable trip: Our group spent two and a half days on the island of Pellworm just off of the Northern German coast before moving on for another two days to the city of Hamburg.

None of the students had ever heard about Pellworm, a tiny island of 14.3 square miles, accessible only by ferry. The island is home to approximately 1,200 people, almost three times as many sheep, and is severely impacted by climate change. Pellworm itself is a product of extreme weather: created in a flood in the 1600s, when what is now Pellworm was torn off a larger island, it is by default between 1.5 and 2.5 meters below sea level and completely walled in with a dike. Ever rising sea levels provide a severe threat to life on the island these days, and living sustainably has become an existential question for the people there. It is therefore little wonder that climate change, sustainable living, and green energy have been on the mind of Pellwormers for decades. The island has been a laboratory for clean energy since the 1980s; in fact, the first experiments with wind turbines were conducted on Pellworm. Today, Pellworm is "energy positive," producing almost seven times more energy than it consumes

            We went to Pellworm to explore the strategies with which people on the island combat climate change. Our time on the island was jam-packed with new experiences and lightbulb moments. We breathed some of the cleanest air we've ever encountered and barely saw a car during the whole time we spent there. We reveled in the beauty of the green pastures, blue skies, and rugged coastline. We admired how the entire community comes together to collect and keep trash off the dikes. During low tide, we hiked through the Wattenmeer (mudflats), a unique and protected ecosystem teeming with life. Wading through the thick and oozy mud that was up to our ankles and, for some daring souls, up to their knees, we followed our 19-year-old tour guide, who dug up samples and had us count worms, shells, snails, tiny crabs, and other creatures to gain a sense of the biodiversity that would be lost if the mudflats were washed away. We enjoyed a completely plastic-free breakfast buffet in the morning and gazed at bright-shining stars at night, thanks to zero light pollution. We marveled at the highly innovative energy infrastructure that an energy expert and local engineer explained to us in-depth in a lecture followed by Q&A.

But we also found ourselves in the midst of the challenges, tensions, trade-offs, and contradictions that characterize the fight against climate change, and we experienced them on a visceral level. In conversations with locals, we learned about the extremely precarious basic infrastructure on the island: one medical doctor, one baker, one undertaker. As a community, Pellworm has tremendous difficulty to staff these kinds of positions. Most young people leave the island as soon as they are done with school, and they rarely return—the island's serene natural beauty and clean air have made it a favorite destination for wealthy retirees from the mainland, leaving many locals unable to afford real estate. We were stunned, moreover, when we experienced the complete disconnect between scientific data and lived reality in some locals who, while fully aware of climate change as an abstract problem, nonetheless refused to acknowledge the concrete threat to their homes ("We have good dikes"). Pellworm's clean energy production is not a straightforward happy story, either: A large part of the surplus energy that Pellworm creates is lost due to the lack of adequate storage options and legal constraints that make it difficult for Pellwormers to feed the energy into the grid on the German mainland.

            Our excursion to the island provided unforgettable experiences, precious learning moments, and opportunities for our group to study the complexities of climate change first-hand. As one of the participating students, Helen Deng '26, put it:

"Through the dikes we felt the island's climate adaptation and mitigation methods with our very feet, and through the animals and beautiful lands, we felt the real, urgent necessity of combating climate change to protect vulnerable places such as Pellworm. It was fascinating to hear about the German energy policies (though bureaucratic) and their changes over time from a local resident living through the policies' impacts." 

The excursion was made possible through a gift from the Class of 1978. We very much appreciate the support of the Class of 1978 and can't wait for the next iteration of "Green City" in the spring 2026.

Petra McGillen and Petra Bonfert-Taylor, Faculty Co-Directors, "Green City" FSP.