Local and state officials in mid-March piled 50,000 sandbags along the low-lying banks of the San Joaquin River when rising levels threatened to overtake Firebaugh.
Emma Gallegos/EdSource
Earlier this year, students across the country watched as wildfires devastated large parts of southern California. Yet even as they watched — and, in some cases, lived through — a very real example of what climate change can look like, many students don’t have a good understanding of why events like these are happening more frequently and with greater intensity. Without that foundational knowledge, they are ill-equipped to help mitigate the problem that is impacting their generation so significantly. Lack of climate literacy is a crisis — one that higher education has a responsibility to address.
Acknowledging the problem is no longer enough. Although 72% of U.S. adults recognize that our climate is changing, only 58% acknowledge that it is human-caused and even fewer understand the scientific consensus — that over 97% of climate scientists affirm our role in the ever-warming planet. We need a climate-literate electorate if we want to drive effective climate action because the solutions we choose to support are based on our individual understanding of the problem. To do this, we need to make climate education part of general education. And we must move quickly.
Many students know what is coming. Rising climate anxiety among 16–25 year-olds is telling but disempowering if they aren’t prepared to meet the moment because they hold misconceptions about the root causes. In a 2021 survey, students 14-18 years old overwhelmingly reported that climate change was real and human-caused, but follow-up questions showed large gaps between their conceptualization of Earth’s interrelated systems and reality. They also vastly underestimated the scientific consensus.
These gaps in knowledge make sense: when climate change is taught in middle and high school classrooms, nearly one-third of science teachers are sending mixed messages about the cause, often because they themselves were never introduced to the subject during their higher education experience. Prioritizing climate literacy as part of general education at colleges and universities would reduce the perpetuation of these false narratives.
Ideally, institutions would offer multi-dimensional climate education for all students; realistically, the pace of climate change far outstrips the pace of change in higher education. However, a general education requirement for climate literacy is possible — and necessary. These central concepts do not rely on additional college-level coursework, making a first- or second-year course on the topic accessible to students in any major.
Given the monumental challenge before us and what the best physical science tells us we are headed toward (e.g. heat waves, sea level rise, drought and more), it would be easy to put together a fairly depressing curriculum. A solutions-focused approach to climate education is not only kinder to our young people, but also cuts against the temptation to spread anxiety. It’s easy to miss out on the momentum building in the clean energy sector, the climate leadership of local communities, and international efforts to build climate resilience. Resources like Project Drawdown and the Solutions Journalism Network can provide curricular materials that remind students that they are not alone, and that they are not starting from square one.
Additionally, we need students to understand that policy, psychology, and art are just as important at shifting our trajectory as atmospheric science and clean energy technology. In this way, we make room for every student in the climate movement, no matter their professional aspirations. At Harvey Mudd College, we have developed a course to help students think critically about the impact of their work on society through an interdisciplinary look at the climate-fueled challenge of fire in the North American west. Our teaching team is intentionally broad, so we can cover California’s legacy of fire suppression, the depictions of nature in media, and the religious roots of environmental attitudes, as well as fire ecology and the greenhouse effect. While we do lay the groundwork for understanding the problem, fully 50% of the course is dedicated to analyzing proposed or current interventions.
In addition to a solutions-focused curriculum, basic climate education also needs to prepare students emotionally and mentally to keep engaging in the work. Nearly 60% of respondents in a recent global survey of youth indicated “extreme worry” about climate change. Considering students’ emotions doesn’t mean we shy away from hard truths — that would not serve our students well and undermine their trust in faculty. In fact, those hard truths can tap into students’ deeper motivations for learning, so long as we also help them build emotional resilience through reflection. Programs like the All We Can Save Project can offer resources and even course materials. And efforts to wrap this “affective approach” into climate education are already underway, as with the Faculty Learning Community in Teaching Climate Change and Resilience at California State University in Chico.
The world is currently on track for nearly twice the rise in global average temperature that leading climate experts warn is safe. The kind of climate education we need is appearing, but not at the scale or speed required. Higher education leaders must prioritize climate literacy by integrating climate education into the general curriculum. Institutions must ensure students are prepared academically, socially, and emotionally to address climate change. We need empowered graduates who have both climate knowledge and a solutions-focused mindset in uncertain times. Their world literally depends on it.
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Lelia Hawkins is a professor of chemistry and the Hixon Professor of Climate Studies at Harvey Mudd College. She is currently serving as the Director of the Hixon Center for Climate and the Environment, a new program expanding climate education for Mudd’s scientists and engineers.
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