climate change case study for students

A Global View of Education and Climate Change

• Posted March 1, 2024
• By Ryan Nagelhout
• Climate Change and Education
• Global Education

Professor Fernando Reimers can see the interconnectivity of it all. So many things impact how students learn, he says, and the unique circumstances that climate change presents in his work are simply another challenge educators will face amid an ever-changing landscape.

Reimers is HGSE’s Ford Foundation Professor of the Practice of International Education and director of Harvard’s Global Education Innovation Initiative. Ultimately, his interest is in finding the best ways to teach children how to thrive in the 21st century, to help them gain the skills to contribute to more inclusive and sustainable communities. That century has and will continue to be impacted by the effects of climate change. As weather patterns change and natural disasters disrupt learning around the world, schools will need to adapt.

Despite the daunting challenges climate change presents to this and future generations, Reimers speaks with optimism about how humanity can meet the moment and create change.

“I think it’s very, very important to be hopeful in the face of existential challenges,” he says, offering an anecdote he shares with his students about the power of writing and what humans have learned over the course of the last 35,000 years. “If you take a long view in thinking about the history of humanity, you understand how necessary hope has been to inspire the human effort and collaboration which have helped us come so far as a species.”

Below, Reimers talks about his education and climate work, teaching students beyond doom and gloom, and lessons climate educators can learn from the pandemic.

What does climate change’s impact look like in the work you do?

The big framing conversation is: What is an education worth having in the 21st century for a student? What is it that students need to learn at every level of the education system that will prepare them well to understand the challenges they’re going to live through? To be motivated to do something and have the skills to address those challenges? Those challenges most certainly include climate, but they do not exclusively include climate.

A challenge that’s very salient and just as urgent as climate is the sustainability of democracy. By every count, democracy is in decline in the United States and in many democratic countries around the world. And it is in decline because people don’t have the skills to sustain it. Universities are currently doing a pretty dismal job — they can’t seem to be equipping students with the skills to talk across political divides, to compromise and reach agreements. Far too many students do not seem to understand what difference it makes to vote, let alone engaging civically for the improvement of our communities and institutions.

And so climate is one thing. Democracy, poverty, and inequality are others. The big disruption to the world of work that AI is going to bring about are some of the other changes in the larger context that educational institutions should respond to. These are some of the existential challenges that should frame a conversation about the goals of educational institutions.

"There is an educational imperative to help students understand climate change as one of the many challenges that humanity will experience, but to do it in a way that gives people hope and cultivates agency."

How can educators better teach climate change literacy?

A climate literacy curriculum should help students understand the process of climate change and how it impacts humans. Students should be able to access the evolving scientific consensus on climate change, as reflected for example in the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change. But they should be able to have this understanding in a way that doesn’t develop a sense of doom and gloom, a sense of hopelessness. In a review of research on the effectiveness of climate change curricula, available in my book Education and Climate Change , I found that many of them contributed to undermine students’ sense of efficacy in facing this challenge. Too many of our youth experience unproductive and debilitating anxiety about climate change.

There is an educational imperative to help students understand climate change as one of the many challenges that humanity will experience, but to do it in a way that gives people hope and cultivates the agency and the knowledge to understand what is a green economy, and to be contributors to a transition to a more sustainable way of living.

What are the larger issues at play with climate change and education?

We know that climate change is going to vanish around 20 million jobs worldwide connected to the oil industry. But it is going to generate three times more new jobs in industries related to climate. What is the implication, for example, for tertiary institutions? People need to know where those jobs are, universities need to have both undergraduate degrees, graduate degrees, diplomas, certificates, that prepare people for those jobs. There are already many universities around the world planning new fields of study and the development of transversal skills in the curriculum associated with climate change. We need to learn from those ongoing efforts and accelerate them.

You’ve worked with Times Higher Education and recently finished a study focused on how universities approach sustainability and climate change. What was the main takeaway?

Yes, the forthcoming issue of Daedalus , the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, includes an article I wrote titled “Educating Students for Climate Action: Distraction or Higher Education Capital?” in which I examine how climate change education is evolving in universities and discuss which approaches are most promising.

I have also chaired, for the last few years, a panel that reviews university innovation in Asia on climate education, as part of a larger effort of the Times Higher Education to spotlight higher education innovation.

What I have learned from that work, and discuss in the paper is that the universities that most effectively address climate change education embed this as one element in their strategy, and then make sure that there are synergies across four activities that they can carry out: research, education of their own students, extension — which includes outreach and education but in many cases it includes working with city governments or state governments helping them develop a green economy transition strategy — and then management of their own operations and infrastructure.

The climate change innovation awards and the impact rankings of the Times Higher Education make visible universities around the world where you see the power of having a vision, a coherent vision that aligns what the university does in all of those four domains. There are many more universities that do a little bit in some of those categories, but work that is piecemeal and affecting a rather small number of students is different as strategically planned work that encompasses the entire institution.

You were also part of a Harvard task force to create a Climate Change Education plan for Harvard and for the Ed School. What did the task force do?

The task force was created by President Larry Bacow. It included faculty from all schools at Harvard. We each worked with our colleagues in our schools identifying opportunities to advance climate education in our schools and for the university as a whole.

In my conversations with our colleagues at HGSE and with the other members of the task force we aimed to do two things: develop a plan for our own school and one for the university, identifying low-hanging fruit, things that could be done without tremendous additional resources over the next 1–3 years, and then more ambitious goals that would require raising some money.

In my conversations with 18 colleagues here at the Ed School to prepare this plan I realized that there is genuine interest among our faculty on this topic, and there is a real appetite to do something. That plan is guiding some of the work of the newly created Salata Institute .

"The way that you make progress tackling big and complex problems is to break them into smaller pieces, and to begin somewhere. And when you solve those problems there, that expands your zone of action and of understanding."

You’ve mentioned that one way to tackle large and complex challenges like climate change is to focus on things at a much smaller scale to make it more manageable and more effective.

That’s exactly right, the way that you make progress tackling big and complex problems is to break them into smaller pieces, and to begin somewhere. And when you solve those problems there, that expands your zone of action and of understanding. Then you move to other parts of the challenge, and so on. I discuss this approach in a recent article : a transition to a green economy addressing these is essential to our mission, not an additional project. As a result of integrating this priority in the institutional strategy, then each person should know what they can personally do within their sphere of influence, within the things they normally do, to make a contribution to advancing this goal. 

That’s how education reform gets implemented — getting to the point where each person understands what their role is to contribute to the larger goal without having to be a hero. Understanding the efforts to contribute to strategic goals not as extra work, not as something that requires work to be done in the evenings, the weekends; but as a different way to tackle what we already do.

How have you followed this approach as you have begun to work on climate change education?

The way I began to tackle this issue was not with new research priorities, it was first embedding into my policy class a focus on the relationship between policy and climate education. Inviting my students to work with governments and other education institutions examining how policy could support a transition to a green economy. The first time I did that I had only four teams of students, the next time I had more. We then published this work, to widen the reach of this work. This simple approach of working with our students to examine how the subjects we study in our classes relate to climate change is within the reach of many different faculties in this university.

What lessons from our response to the pandemic could help address climate change?

The full story of the education impact of the pandemic, and of our responses to it, is still developing. It’s not all been discovered yet. But there are clearly some parallels as well as some differences. With the pandemic, we didn’t really have a choice about an unplanned event disrupting education and upending our lives. Climate change is largely caused by human actions, and our responses will mediate how it impacts our lives. That’s basically what the efforts of many people working on climate change have been about for the last 20 or so years, to get humans to understand that we need to live differently. We need to consume differently. We need to share the financial burden of these adjustments across countries differently if we’re going to reduce the speed at which global warming is taking place. But getting a species of 8 billion members to change their ways of life is most definitely a complicated task. I’m not sure we’ve ever done it in anything else. That is the challenge, and education is absolutely indispensable to addressing it. 

The latest research, perspectives, and highlights from the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Seven case studies in carbon and climate

Every part of the mosaic of Earth's surface — ocean and land, Arctic and tropics, forest and grassland — absorbs and releases carbon in a different way. Wild-card events such as massive wildfires and drought complicate the global picture even more. To better predict future climate, we need to understand how Earth's ecosystems will change as the climate warms and how extreme events will shape and interact with the future environment. Here are seven pressing concerns.

The Far North is warming twice as fast as the rest of Earth, on average. With a 5-year Arctic airborne observing campaign just wrapping up and a 10-year campaign just starting that will integrate airborne, satellite and surface measurements, NASA is using unprecedented resources to discover how the drastic changes in Arctic carbon are likely to influence our climatic future.

Wildfires have become common in the North. Because firefighting is so difficult in remote areas, many of these fires burn unchecked for months, throwing huge plumes of carbon into the atmosphere. A recent report found a nearly 10-fold increase in the number of large fires in the Arctic region over the last 50 years, and the total area burned by fires is increasing annually.

Organic carbon from plant and animal remains is preserved for millennia in frozen Arctic soil, too cold to decompose. Arctic soils known as permafrost contain more carbon than there is in Earth's atmosphere today. As the frozen landscape continues to thaw, the likelihood increases that not only fires but decomposition will create Arctic atmospheric emissions rivaling those of fossil fuels. The chemical form these emissions take — carbon dioxide or methane — will make a big difference in how much greenhouse warming they create.

Initial results from NASA's Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) airborne campaign have allayed concerns that large bursts of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas, are already being released from thawing Arctic soils. CARVE principal investigator Charles Miller of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California, is looking forward to NASA's ABoVE field campaign (Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment) to gain more insight. "CARVE just scratched the surface, compared to what ABoVE will do," Miller said.

Methane is the Billy the Kid of carbon-containing greenhouse gases: it does a lot of damage in a short life. There's much less of it in Earth's atmosphere than there is carbon dioxide, but molecule for molecule, it causes far more greenhouse warming than CO 2 does over its average 10-year life span in the atmosphere.

Methane is produced by bacteria that decompose organic material in damp places with little or no oxygen, such as freshwater marshes and the stomachs of cows. Currently, over half of atmospheric methane comes from human-related sources, such as livestock, rice farming, landfills and leaks of natural gas. Natural sources include termites and wetlands. Because of increasing human sources, the atmospheric concentration of methane has doubled in the last 200 years to a level not seen on our planet for 650,000 years.

Locating and measuring human emissions of methane are significant challenges. NASA's Carbon Monitoring System is funding several projects testing new technologies and techniques to improve our ability to monitor the colorless gas and help decision makers pinpoint sources of emissions. One project, led by Daniel Jacob of Harvard University, used satellite observations of methane to infer emissions over North America. The research found that human methane emissions in eastern Texas were 50 to 100 percent higher than previous estimates. "This study shows the potential of satellite observations to assess how methane emissions are changing," said Kevin Bowman, a JPL research scientist who was a coauthor of the study.

Tropical forests

Tropical forests are carbon storage heavyweights. The Amazon in South America alone absorbs a quarter of all carbon dioxide that ends up on land. Forests in Asia and Africa also do their part in "breathing in" as much carbon dioxide as possible and using it to grow.

However, there is evidence that tropical forests may be reaching some kind of limit to growth. While growth rates in temperate and boreal forests continue to increase, trees in the Amazon have been growing more slowly in recent years. They've also been dying sooner. That's partly because the forest was stressed by two severe droughts in 2005 and 2010 — so severe that the Amazon emitted more carbon overall than it absorbed during those years, due to increased fires and reduced growth. Those unprecedented droughts may have been only a foretaste of what is ahead, because models predict that droughts will increase in frequency and severity in the future.

In the past 40-50 years, the greatest threat to tropical rainforests has been not climate but humans, and here the news from the Amazon is better. Brazil has reduced Amazon deforestation in its territory by 60 to 70 percent since 2004, despite troubling increases in the last three years. According to Doug Morton, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, further reductions may not make a marked difference in the global carbon budget. "No one wants to abandon efforts to preserve and protect the tropical forests," he said. "But doing that with the expectation that [it] is a meaningful way to address global greenhouse gas emissions has become less defensible."

In the last few years, Brazil's progress has left Indonesia the distinction of being the nation with the highest deforestation rate and also with the largest overall area of forest cleared in the world. Although Indonesia's forests are only a quarter to a fifth the extent of the Amazon, fires there emit massive amounts of carbon, because about half of the Indonesian forests grow on carbon-rich peat. A recent study estimated that this fall, daily greenhouse gas emissions from recent Indonesian fires regularly surpassed daily emissions from the entire United States.

Wildfires are natural and necessary for some forest ecosystems, keeping them healthy by fertilizing soil, clearing ground for young plants, and allowing species to germinate and reproduce. Like the carbon cycle itself, fires are being pushed out of their normal roles by climate change. Shorter winters and higher temperatures during the other seasons lead to drier vegetation and soils. Globally, fire seasons are almost 20 percent longer today, on average, than they were 35 years ago.

Currently, wildfires are estimated to spew 2 to 4 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year on average — about half as much as is emitted by fossil fuel burning. Large as that number is, it's just the beginning of the impact of fires on the carbon cycle. As a burned forest regrows, decades will pass before it reaches its former levels of carbon absorption. If the area is cleared for agriculture, the croplands will never absorb as much carbon as the forest did.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to increase and global temperatures warm, climate models show the threat of wildfires increasing throughout this century. In Earth's more arid regions like the U.S. West, rising temperatures will continue to dry out vegetation so fires start and burn more easily. In Arctic and boreal ecosystems, intense wildfires are burning not just the trees, but also the carbon-rich soil itself, accelerating the thaw of permafrost, and dumping even more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

North American forests

With decades of Landsat satellite imagery at their fingertips, researchers can track changes to North American forests since the mid-1980s. A warming climate is making its presence known.

Through the North American Forest Dynamics project, and a dataset based on Landsat imagery released this earlier this month, researchers can track where tree cover is disappearing through logging, wildfires, windstorms, insect outbreaks, drought, mountaintop mining, and people clearing land for development and agriculture. Equally, they can see where forests are growing back over past logging projects, abandoned croplands and other previously disturbed areas.

"One takeaway from the project is how active U.S. forests are, and how young American forests are," said Jeff Masek of Goddard, one of the project’s principal investigators along with researchers from the University of Maryland and the U.S. Forest Service. In the Southeast, fast-growing tree farms illustrate a human influence on the forest life cycle. In the West, however, much of the forest disturbance is directly or indirectly tied to climate. Wildfires stretched across more acres in Alaska this year than they have in any other year in the satellite record. Insects and drought have turned green forests brown in the Rocky Mountains. In the Southwest, pinyon-juniper forests have died back due to drought.

Scientists are studying North American forests and the carbon they store with other remote sensing instruments. With radars and lidars, which measure height of vegetation from satellite or airborne platforms, they can calculate how much biomass — the total amount of plant material, like trunks, stems and leaves — these forests contain. Then, models looking at how fast forests are growing or shrinking can calculate carbon uptake and release into the atmosphere. An instrument planned to fly on the International Space Station (ISS), called the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) lidar, will measure tree height from orbit, and a second ISS mission called the Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) will monitor how forests are using water, an indicator of their carbon uptake during growth. Two other upcoming radar satellite missions (the NASA-ISRO SAR radar, or NISAR, and the European Space Agency’s BIOMASS radar) will provide even more complementary, comprehensive information on vegetation.

Ocean carbon absorption

When carbon-dioxide-rich air meets seawater containing less carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas diffuses from the atmosphere into the ocean as irresistibly as a ball rolls downhill. Today, about a quarter of human-produced carbon dioxide emissions get absorbed into the ocean. Once the carbon is in the water, it can stay there for hundreds of years.

Warm, CO 2 -rich surface water flows in ocean currents to colder parts of the globe, releasing its heat along the way. In the polar regions, the now-cool water sinks several miles deep, carrying its carbon burden to the depths. Eventually, that same water wells up far away and returns carbon to the surface; but the entire trip is thought to take about a thousand years. In other words, water upwelling today dates from the Middle Ages – long before fossil fuel emissions.

That's good for the atmosphere, but the ocean pays a heavy price for absorbing so much carbon: acidification. Carbon dioxide reacts chemically with seawater to make the water more acidic. This fundamental change threatens many marine creatures. The chain of chemical reactions ends up reducing the amount of a particular form of carbon — the carbonate ion — that these organisms need to make shells and skeletons. Dubbed the “other carbon dioxide problem,” ocean acidification has potential impacts on millions of people who depend on the ocean for food and resources.

Phytoplankton

Microscopic, aquatic plants called phytoplankton are another way that ocean ecosystems absorb carbon dioxide emissions. Phytoplankton float with currents, consuming carbon dioxide as they grow. They are at the base of the ocean's food chain, eaten by tiny animals called zooplankton that are then consumed by larger species. When phytoplankton and zooplankton die, they may sink to the ocean floor, taking the carbon stored in their bodies with them.

Satellite instruments like the Moderate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra and Aqua let us observe ocean color, which researchers can use to estimate abundance — more green equals more phytoplankton. But not all phytoplankton are equal. Some bigger species, like diatoms, need more nutrients in the surface waters. The bigger species also are generally heavier so more readily sink to the ocean floor.

As ocean currents change, however, the layers of surface water that have the right mix of sunlight, temperature and nutrients for phytoplankton to thrive are changing as well. “In the Northern Hemisphere, there’s a declining trend in phytoplankton,” said Cecile Rousseaux, an oceanographer with the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at Goddard. She used models to determine that the decline at the highest latitudes was due to a decrease in abundance of diatoms. One future mission, the Pre-Aerosol, Clouds, and ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite, will use instruments designed to see shades of color in the ocean — and through that, allow scientists to better quantify different phytoplankton species.

In the Arctic, however, phytoplankton may be increasing due to climate change. The NASA-sponsored Impacts of Climate on the Eco-Systems and Chemistry of the Arctic Pacific Environment (ICESCAPE) expedition on a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker in 2010 and 2011 found unprecedented phytoplankton blooms under about three feet (a meter) of sea ice off Alaska. Scientists think this unusually thin ice allows sunlight to filter down to the water, catalyzing plant blooms where they had never been observed before.

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Climate change: educating students to fight the crisis

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With the latest UN climate report containing worrying evidence that climate change is having a major effect on all aspects of the environment, how can teachers help children and adults to sort through the growing mass of information, avoid being overwhelmed, and come to an understanding of the challenges, and potential solutions, to what the UN Secretary-General has called “an existential crisis”?

A UN programme for schools is looking to make education a central part of the international response to climate change, and empower students with the knowledge they need to fight the crisis, and adapt to its impacts.

For Natukunda Edetruda, a student at Immaculate Heart School, Uganda, it is important for young people to play a key role in fighting climate change. “The future lies in the hands of the youth, and the youth have a role to play to either destroy it or to keep it. I believe that change begins with an individual and, as an individual, I believe that I should be empowered to protect the environment”.

Natakunda’s school is one of 258 educational establishments, in 25 countries, that took part in a pilot project organized by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ( UNESCO ) Associated Schools Network ( ASPnet ), aimed at integrating sustainability, including climate action, into every aspect of school life.

Students and teachers at Immaculate Heart school have taken part in a diverse range of sustainability-related activities, including using recycled glass to make glaze for use in ceramics classes, and constructing a water filter to prevent diseases associated with dirty water.

Other schools in the programme focused on improving the built environment. Waldorf School in Namibia has offset the environmental impact of the school building by planting trees and vegetation, and St. Jude School in Costa Rica has replaced its air conditioners with more environmentally-friendly alternatives, and the students of Cours Saint Marie de Hann in Senegal made a hanging garden from recycled bottles and tyres.

The feedback from schools has been extremely positive, demonstrating a number of positive outcomes. Participating schools greened their premises, improving water, waste and energy management, and the overall health and well-being of school communities; students and teachers developed a stronger environmental conscience, and a vision of how their schools and communities can become more sustainable, and resilient to climate change.

Schools can empower students to change their behaviour and take action for the planet Sabine Detzel, outgoing International Coordinator, UNESCO Associated Schools Network

“There is an enormous wave of optimism that comes out of a project like this’ says Sabine Detzel, outgoing International Coordinator of ASPnet. “You see that people are interested to engage and are ready to do things, and that schools, in a very short time, can be transformed so that they motivate and empower students to change their behaviour and take action for the planet”.

The success of the pilot project, which ran from 2016 to 2018, has prompted ASPnet to invite all its member institutions – some 11,500 schools in 180 countries – to adopt a similar approach and develop action plans to counter climate change at the local level.

Getting climate-ready

The UNESCO programme demonstrates the importance of making climate action a part of every aspect of school life, from teaching to the way schools are run, and the impact they have on the local community.

The agency has produced a guide for schools, called Getting Climate-Ready , which advocates for this “whole-school” approach. Several benefits have been identified by teachers, such as more meaningful and hands-on learning opportunities, significant reductions in the schools’ ecological footprints, and savings through more efficient use of resources.

For example, at Colégio Israelita Brasileiro, a school in Rio de Janeiro, everyone at the school, from janitors to teachers, students and support staff, participates in climate-related learning activities. These include building solar and bamboo bicycle racks, and converting used cooking oil into biodiesel. The activities have created bonds between different members of the school community, and brought about a sense of belonging and pride.

At the First Experimental Lyceum, a school in Gennadeio, Greece, an innovative approach has been taken to climate action teaching: biology and chemistry students worked in groups to investigate climate change, virus transmission and the dynamics of ecosystems, using computer simulations.

The findings were then applied to their school building, to find its environmental weaknesses and develop a plan to improve it. This approach was found to engage students, and enrich their knowledge about real-world problems.

Whilst some subjects have an obvious link to climate action (for example, geography and the sciences), the guide suggest ways that many other subjects can include the topic.

History, for example, can examine how societies have, in the past, reacted to environmental challenges. Language and literature classes can help students to develop the communication skills needed to respond to local and global issues, mathematics students can produce graphs showing the change in school energy use, and civics students can interview local officials on the actions they are taking to address the problem.

‘Almost all countries’ educating children about climate change

Encouragingly, nearly all countries have committed to climate change education,  a  UNESCO report released in December 2019 has revealed.

The study found that the most common commitment is to the raising of public awareness, and that cognitive learning is more commonly discussed (i.e. integrating climate knowledge into classroom teaching), rather than social and emotional or behavioural learning. However, it also showed that actual progress is currently hard to monitor, because of a lack of data.

The UN is calling for nothing less than a transformation of the global economy in which technology, science, finance and ingenuity are all focused on ensuring a sustainable future for all.

However, this will only happen if school-leavers have the skills needed to answer the demands of this new, greener economy, and that will require strong leadership from all sectors of society, including governments, international organizations, the private sector and civil society.

• Established in 1953, ASPnet contributes to the transformation of education systems and policies, through the creation of innovative content and teaching techniques,
• current membership covers over 11 500 schools from all levels of education in 180 countries,
• ASPnet is currently looking for partnerships with organizations interested in engaging with climate change education, and willing to contribute funding. Interested organizations can email ASPnet here .
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Climate Change Case Study Presentations

July 25, 2021

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Authored by:.

This past week, the CCM1 students presented their case studies. Students worked to highlight an important impact of Climate Change on society and culture. Some did essays, and others did presentations! Their reflection included a description of the likely source of Climate Change in the example, how society and culture are impacted, as well as related attempts at adaptation and mitigation strategies. Finally, they proposed their own ideas for solutions. Students presented in different forms! 

Group 1 - Sustainability in Fashion  (Anna, Clara, Phoebe)

Fast fashion has a major impact on the environment and causes large amounts of waste. Stores like Forever 21 and Zara may try to be more sustainable, but are adding to the toxic waste created from fast fashion. There are more brands emerging like Girlfriend Collective, who are sustainable and transparent about their pledge to creating sustainable clothing and who are being a brand that reduces their impact on the environment.

Group 2 - Change in Seasons: Hotter, Dryer, Longer (Camila, Chloe, Kaitlyn)

Temperatures are rising due to the Greenhouse Effect and are having a negative impact on nature and humans. The Greenhouse effect is leading to an increase in wildfires and drought, impacting agriculture, and affecting the lives of migrant workers.

Group 3 - Climate Change Legislation - (Craig and Tristian)

Climate change has pressured countries to address their carbon footprint. We did a comparative analysis of the climate legislation in countries like the U.S., China, Spain, and the United Kingdom. We noticed that some countries, like Costa Rica, are really focused on creating impactful climate change legislation, while other countries do not stress climate change as an importance. This directly impacts how the people who live in that country address climate change.

Group 4  - Climate Change and Disease - (Thomas and Asa)

Human activity is causing climate change and habitat disruption. Events like deforestation cause animal habitat loss, which leads to the displacement of animals. Displaced animals can cause an increase proximity to humans, thus leading to human exposure to more diseases. Some solutions can include early preemptive vaccination, early treatment and reforestation.

Group 5 -  Psychological effects of Climate Change - (Halimatou, Mia, Eva)

Maintaining mental health through the effects of climate change is very important. Climate change can cause droughts, change in agriculture and climate conditions, which can effect communities and farmers. Loss of homes and environments due to climate change can also have a major impact on the mental health of humans whose homes are being directly impacted by climate change.

Group 6 -  Reducing Carbon Emissions in Boston - (Hannah, Chelsea, Anais)

Boston is a huge contributor of carbon emissions, which adds to the impact of global warming. Boston is and should still create alternative options for transportation. Creating incentives for citizens who use bikes for transportation rather than public transportation can be set up to encourage citizens to reduce their carbon footprint. Even encouraging carpooling and creating road tolls that would enforce citizens who do not carpool to pay, thus encouraging carpooling. These efforts can help to reduce carbon emissions in Boston.

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What We Do: Case Studies in Climate Change

Field trip lets students study climate change in the living lab of Eastern California.

Danielle Underferth

When it comes to climate change, California provides an ideal case study. And Scot Miller wants his students to be where the science is.

Miller, an assistant professor in the Whiting School of Engineering, took students on a field trip to Death Valley this spring to round out their classwork for the seminar Case Studies in Climate Change. The trip was designed to give the group a thorough understanding of how the Earth’s climate has fluctuated over time, how those fluctuations can be traced in the physical environment, and how one state – California – is managing repercussions from the rapid, human-made changes underway now.

Studying the past to understand the present

Climate change is not a new phenomenon. Over the past several million years, the Earth's climate has changed dramatically, with periods dominated by roaming glaciers and even a “snowball Earth” phase, when the entire globe was covered in ice.

Death Valley National Park and Eastern California are excellent locations to observe evidence of these changes, says Miller. “The region is a hub of global research on past climate change.”

It’s also an ideal place to study and understand the impacts of current climate change, he says.

“There is arguably no state that is more heavily impacted by current climate change than California, and the state government has taken global leadership by enacting innovative climate mitigation and management policies.”

Learning across disciplines

In order to understand climate trends and impacts, Miller’s students studied and did field work in the areas of geology, ecology, chemistry, meteorology, hydrology, and even public policy.

Activities included mapping and interpreting geological formations that show how the Earth swung from cold to hot climate extremes, measuring trees in different ecosystems to estimate how much carbon is locked up in certain ecosystems, and then modeling how carbon storage may change as those ecosystems adjust to a changing climate, collecting tree cores to observe variations in climate that stressed or benefited trees, and evaluating how California’s policies improve, or in some cases worsen climate stresses.

"The class was an amazing opportunity to learn about our climate not only through books and pictures but also through the experience of seeing the evidence of a changing climate in person,” said student Madi Miro. “It was definitely one of the best experiences I was able to have at Hopkins."

For Miller, it’s important for students to learn not just about how climate is changing, but also about how scientists track the magnitude and impacts of climate change.

“I strongly believe that field-based and experiential learning can bring academic material to life. While in the field, we can connect academic climate science and academic discussions of policy with real-world climate impacts that are already starting to occur,” he says. “Climate change is more than an abstract academic subject. It’s a phenomenon that’s happening in the here and now, and we can see these impacts around us if we know where to look.”

Environmental Health and Engineering is a cross-divisional department spanning the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Whiting School of Engineering. This hybrid department is uniquely designed to lead pioneering research and prepare the next generation of scholars to solve critical and complex issues at the interface of public health and engineering.

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Greenhouse gases - Mini Case Study for Climate Detectives

This mini case study is dedicated to the topic of climate change and greenhouse gases and students will investigate how greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations in the atmosphere evolved in their country in the last decades. 

The Mini Case Studies for Climate Detectives are intended to help Climate Detectives teams to identify a climate related topic that they can investigate and that applies to real world situations.  

In this mini case study, students will try to answer the research questions: “How have greenhouse gas emissions evolved in your country in the last decades? What are the past and present concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? For that, teachers will find in the resource suggestions of different types of data that students could collect and analyse. The suggestions are not exhaustive, and the teachers may decide on their own specific focus within a given research area.  

The mini case study should be used in conjunction with the Climate Detectives  teacher guide  and not as a standalone document. 

Subject: Science; technology 

Age range: 12-17 years old 

Keywords: Climate; Climate Change; Earth Observation; Greenhouse Gases; Science; Technology 

Download : mini case study

This resource is part of a set of resources developed by ESA’s Education Office in collaboration with ESEROs to support the Climate Detectives project. 

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• Open access
• Published: 08 October 2022

A participatory student workshop on climate change and sustainability: a comparative case study

• Carole Larose   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0818-2200 1 ,
• Christine Blaisot 2 &
• Eleanor Burke 3  

Sustainable Earth volume  5 , Article number:  3 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Climate change is an environmental and existential issue of great urgency, especially for today’s youth. Until recently, the French national school curriculum had not given students much opportunity to learn about climate change (CC), its causes and repercussions, and mitigating measures to reach sustainable climate conditions. This article describes a six-week participatory, experiential workshop that brought together two groups of French students (one age 10 and the other age 16) to learn and teach each other about CC. Older students learned about the Conference of the Parties, COP21 Paris agreement and the IPCC climate findings and recommendations. Together the two groups developed greater understanding about CC, and proposed concrete environmental actions that they could undertake at home and in their local district to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We examine four products of their collaboration:

slide presentations that they created jointly,

students’ written reflections on learning about sustainability and CC,

the group’s list of proposed personal and family actions to decrease their carbon footprint, and

notes from a meeting with local governmental officials.

We draw inferences from these sources, and extract two recurrent themes in the students’ learning. These themes highlight a mismatch between youth’s sense of urgency to respond to the climate emergency and the older generation’s sluggish pace of addressing it. This article is a qualitative case study of a successful attempt to raise students’ awareness of sustainability and climatic issues, and to involve them in thinking collaboratively with others about the tasks ahead to address the problem of climate change from a local perspective.

Introduction

“Today’s children will likely confront challenges we can hardly begin to imagine in a radically altered, unrecognizable world. Can we responsibly continue preparing them for business as usual? And if not, what can we do to make them ready for a survival game in which wild cards rule?” — Dianne Dumanoski [ 1 ]

In 2015, before sustainability became embedded in the French curriculum, the co-authors of this article believed, like Diane Dumanoski, that today’s children must be prepared for the radically altered world that they stand to inherit. We (Larose and Blaisot) designed an experiential workshop to introduce the basics of sustainability and sustainable development to our students through the lens of climate change. This article will describe and analyze the students’ learning from the workshop.

Currently, sustainability education is required to be present in both the French primary ( école ) and secondary school ( lycée ) curricula; its presence was reinforced in 2019 by the national curriculum agency: Conseil supérieur des programmes [ 2 ]. The initiative is called E3D , which stands for École/Établissement en Démarche de Développement Durable (School Moving Towards Sustainable Development). Through this initiative, every staff member and student in each school building would play a part in the process of implementing concrete solutions in line with the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [ 3 ] in the areas pertaining to school and facility management, such as energy and water usage, waste reduction, recycling and disposal, landscaping, and throughout all levels of classroom lessons. This vision has not yet been fully achieved.

High school teachers are more constrained to a specific curriculum (which currently does not include content on sustainability) in order to prepare students for their level exams. For this reason, our students who chose to take this optional project in Première (age 15–16, equivalent to US junior year), spent an extra hour of learning outside the normal school day for the 6-week duration of the course.

This article describes a six-week collaborative experiential workshop that brought together two groups of French students, (age 10 and ages 15–16) to learn and teach each other about climate change (CC). The older students learned about the Conference of the Parties (COP21) Paris agreement and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate findings and recommendations. Together the two groups developed greater understanding about CC and proposed concrete environmental actions that they could take to their families and their local communities in order to promote climate sustainability. This collaboration was one of four award-winning curriculum projects in the field of sustainable development at the Concours des clés au développement durable (Contest of keys to SD) during France Climate Week in 2015. The award was presented by the Minister of Education, Najat Vallaud Belkasem.

Co-authors Larose and Blaisot undertook this project with their students in 2015, before the national sustainability curriculum was instituted; it occurred at a time when the topic of sustainability became prominent in the news media because of the UN-SDGs [ 3 ] and the UN Climate Change Conference, (The 21st Conference of Parties, or COP 21) held in Paris in November–December 2015. This is one reason why the authors chose to create this particular workshop. It is likely that students were also hearing the news and developed interest in registering for this workshop.

In this article we distinguish between the two age groups by referring to the older learners as ‘ students ’ and to the younger learners as ‘ pupil s’. While the two age groups were at very different developmental levels, their performance in this collaborative project would allow them to learn from and with each other, and gain crucial twenty-first century sustainability literacy skills such as:

Gaining fundamental knowledge about environmental sciences: Many articles are featured by newspapers, television and other social media on issues of sustainability and climate change, but the notions and the terminology remain hazy in the minds of many people.

The ability to assess different kinds and sources of information: Students used scientific approaches to learn how scientists study climate change and make projections into the future, and learned that the models have to take into account many parameters and uncertainties. Climate skeptics use these uncertainties to argue that we are not in a drastic situation. Students learned to rebut such skeptics’ arguments.

Learning about responsible, realistic and hopeful behaviors: Students learned and in turn taught their parents about sustainability and climate change, without succumbing to catastrophic-thinking.

Research question

Our research question was: How can we engage our students and pupils in a learning experience that will make them aware of the challenges of sustainability in our society? What are effective ways of involving them in sustainability issues?

In the Methods section, we describe our six-week experiential workshop that engaged the two groups to learn about sustainability together; we used four of their work-products to assess what they learned and gain insight into how aspects of the workshop promoted their learning. In the Results section we describe these student-pupil work-products:

Informative slide presentations illustrating the learning that they had acquired,

Written reflections on their learning,

A list of personal and family actions for sustainable living, and

Notes from the students’ 2-hour meeting with a town official.

In the Discussion section we discern two themes that emerged from these student-pupil work products and we draw some inferences about their learning during these experiences. These observations and remarks will be of a qualitative nature because of the real-world setting and ungraded nature of our project. As this was a curricular project of an experiential nature for students, pupils and teachers together, the learners are not considered ‘subjects’ of a study, and no special permissions or board reviews were necessary. In the interests of confidentiality, no student is identified by name here; likewise for the town officials whom the students interviewed as part of the project.

Climate change (CC) is one of the biggest challenges of our times and is one of the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) [ 3 ] to transform our world; SDG13 is dedicated to Climate Action. In addition, the climate ramifications of GHG emissions feature in several other SDGs, such as SDG2 zero hunger, SDG3 good health, SDG6 fresh water availability, SDG7 energy efficiency, SDG11 sustainable cities, and SDG16 peace and (climate) justice. In fact, many argue that the climate is at the core of all 17 goals, since it provides the habitable living spaces and food resources we need for survival. In the French high school curriculum, climate change is only taught during the last year, and only when students choose the specialty ‘Biology and Earth Sciences’. In the absence of formal curriculum content, Larose conceived this project because she believes it is crucial that students get involved in this topic earlier in their learning, regardless of their academic studies and specialties. Co-author Blaisot, a teacher in primary school, was equally interested in early learning about sustainability, and both authors decided to organize a 6-week experiential learning collaboration between the two groups of learners.

Eight students and 27 pupils attended the workshop, hoping to gain scientific knowledge about CC. Furthermore, they wanted to understand the COP21 commitments that they were hearing about in the French news. This agreement of 197 negotiating parties marked the first time that a comprehensive universal agreement was reached in the fight against CC. The French president called on the entire world to transform the Paris Accord on Climate into actions to confront this urgent problem [ 4 ].

The two age groups worked independently in their separate schools for the first 3 weeks, to prepare for the joint-sessions with each other to occur in the last 3 weeks. The primary school curriculum system offered the advantage of being able to work on the project for entire days rather than only 1 h per week. As this was a multi-disciplinary project, students and pupils were able to draw on a wide range of disciplines as they delved into learning about climate change and sustainable behaviors .

Table 1 describes the learning experience each group had during each of the 6 weeks.

In November of the following year, the pupils who had been elected “Eco-delegates” by their classmates took part in the youth forum on climate with delegates from other primary, middle and high schools in the Rouen school region, a convention held at the Regional Authority Headquarters. They heard a keynote on the causes and consequences of CC. Then they took the floor to present their ideas for reducing GHG emissions and their impact on the planet. Following this, they took part in thematic workshops. After the convention the pupils took these ideas into the middle school where they presented their project to students in the level ahead of them.

Neither group of students received traditional grades for their work during the workshop. However, to assess what students had learned from the project, the collaborating teachers used evidence from four types of student/pupil work:

Student-pupil-created slide presentations that illustrated the knowledge that they had acquired;

Written reflections on their learning;

Preparations for and participation in a discussion with Mrs. H at the local Town Hall;

Creation of two lists of sustainable-living actions, one for their parents and one to propose to the town authorities.

Co-created slide shows

During the third week of the workshop, the secondary students prepared for meeting the pupils the following week. Each student chose a topic from this list: Consumption, Agriculture, Water Management, Biodiversity, Population migrations within and across national borders, Health, Energy.

They used critical thinking to choose pictures, graphs and statistical figures among resources proposed by their teacher. They were to use these communication supports to explain the worldwide consequences of global warming. Each group of students chose supporting evidence, then showed and explained their choices to the others. The larger group debated and selected the best illustrative evidence, and organized their documents to create a single slideshow.

Similarly at the primary school, the pupils did the same work. Three or four children per group prepared a slideshow using the same topics but concentrating on the more localized consequences of global warming in France. This task was more difficult for them because it was the first time that they had used digital tools to make slideshows. They learned to choose visuals that would illustrate their words, in order to engage their audience.

In week four, the two groups met together: five or six pupils worked with one student on their chosen topic, and both age-groups’ slideshows were used to create a final presentation for each of the eight topics. The following Figs.  1 ,  2 ,  3 ,  4 ,  5 ,  6 and 7 show sample illustrations that they selected for each of the eight topics. An explanation of their reasoning follows each figure.

Representative slide from a student presentation about Consumption and climate change. Credit: extrait d’une brochure “Des gaz à effet de serre dans mon assiette” publiée par Réseau action climat France (itinéraire d’un steak haché et émissions de GES) . (The publisher gives permission to use these in public education.) [ 7 ]

Representative slide from a student presentation about Agriculture and climate change ( http://www.reporterre.net/climat-l-agriculture-est-la-source )

Representative slide from a student presentation about Water Resource Management and climate change. https.ecologie.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/ONERC_FichesIndicateur_glacier.pdf [ 8 ]

Representative slide from student presentation about Biodiversity and climate change. Predicted distribution of vineyards under climate change scenario RCP 8.5 [ 9 ]

Representative slide from student presentation about Population Migrations and climate change. Source: Kit pédagogique le changement climatique p30. https://reseauactionclimat.org/publications/kit-pedagogique-changements-climatiques/ (Publisher gives permission to use these in public education.) [ 10 ]

Representative slide from student presentation on Health and climate change. Source: Kit pédagogique le changement climatique p 40. https://reseauactionclimat.org/publications/kit-pedagogique-changements-climatiques/ [ 11 ] 

Representative slide from student presentation on Energy and climate change. Source: http://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/10068/ used in accord with Creative Commons license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ [ 12 ]

The pupils chose these images to speak to the issue of greenhouse gas emission in livestock raising: The steak’s journey from animal to plate helped them explain how food, or specifically meat- production is a source of greenhouse gas emissions. Meat consumption is increasing all over the world but its production requires a lot of energy. Populations are increasing and cereal production has to increase to feed humankind as well. However, arable land areas remain stable, and can no longer increase to meet the need.

The students chose this chart because it astonished them to learn that agriculture is accountable for large amounts of GHG emissions. They were taken aback to learn that most French crops would need to be moved from south to north (especially vineyards, an important crop in France), and that enteric fermentation (digestion of food by livestock and the resulting methane they emit) is a main cause of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions.

The pupils and the students learned that just 3% of Earth’s water is freshwater and 70% of this is consumed for crop irrigation. They proved that meat production consumes more water than cereals, tying this with the observations made during the work on consumption. They also learned that since resources are unequally spread over the Earth, political tensions over water rights will increase.

The pupils opted to work on the topic of drinking water. The two images of a glacier show its rapid melting in one century. This photo was one they could quickly and easily understand. They also chose a map of France showing the state of groundwater resources and regional water tables. It helped them learn about rainwater flow issues. The final image they chose shows the quantities of water consumed in different daily uses. It allowed them to question their own water usage for things like flushing the toilet and washing the car.

The pupils chose to use this map of French vineyards because it isn’t only about plants that grow in their own region. French vineyards characteristically grow south of the Loire River (light pink areas on map). If climate warming causes viticulture to move northward (green areas) into the students’ region of Normandy, as the scenario map predicts, this would change the French countrysides, with the disappearance of vineyards where they currently exist (gray areas); this could cause an economic disruption affecting both the wine and tourism industries. The students used a similar map to show that other plants (oak and beech trees, e.g.) will likely disappear from their current habitat regions in northern France.

The students learned from these maps that global warming has a direct effect on biodiversity, and that current species can either: vanish, be forced to migrate, or benefit from the change and increase their areas of distribution at the risk of threatening the native species in the areas they overtake.

The students had not previously considered the huge impact of the rise in sea level on coastal populations, where one-fifth of the world’s people live, threatened by rising seas and floods. They also learned that loss of coastal population centers, homes and livelihoods would be a disaster for the poorest populations, who would lose everything they had, without financial or skill resources to replace their losses.

The pupils were quite interested in the unit on health, and they found it difficult to choose which of the many illustrations of the effects of climate change on health they wanted to use in their presentation. They chose a map showing the appearance and spread of the tiger mosquito, a disease vector, into France. The map shows that climate warming in France is creating a suitable habitat for the mosquito, and thus for the appearance of illnesses formerly unknown in French metropolitan areas. They also chose a graph showing the relationship between the increase in temperatures and the number of deaths during heatwaves. The students added information on air pollution especially linked to the formation of tropospheric ozone and the consequences on respiratory diseases, risks of sunstroke, dehydration, and cancers.

The students chose this chart to show that fossil energy consumption increases due to the growth in the number of people on Earth, resultsing in more emissions of GHG. They also learned the amounts of GHG stemming from energy production and the sites of energy waste within a house. This illustration allowed them to reflect on ways to economize on energy usage in their daily lives.

Student reflections on their workshop experience

The feedback that students provided demonstrated their interest in this topic and indicated which skills they felt the project had encouraged them to develop. Table  2 presents direct quotes from students in both age groups. These quotes highlight their reflections on their learning.

The list of lifestyle changes created by the students

The pupils had strong ideas about solutions to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases. We worked on two axes: what children could do at their level and what adults should do at their level. For the younger learners, it seemed simple: they reasoned that if we know the solution to the problem, we apply it. They have not yet grasped the economic complexities or international negotiations that this can generate. Some of their proposals were not easily practicable, such as:

Vehicles that consume fossil fuel must be banned immediately and replaced by biofuel or electric vehicles.

We have to eliminate power plants that generate energy from fossil fuels and just use renewable energy sources.

Through discussion, the two age groups co-created a list of feasible activities they could employ and suggest in their meetings with town officials. Table  3 summarizes all the proposals the group discussed.

After presenting these proposals at Town Hall, the learners discussed their proposals with their families. Thus, parents decided to make some commitments.

Table  4 shows commitments made by each group, students, families, and local officials. Because the school year ended and students moved on to new settings, it was not possible to follow up on how well the family commitments were followed. The pollinator garden, however, was completed at the primary school the year just after the project, as seen in Fig.  8 .

Pupils working in the pollinator garden

Conversation with an agent at the town hall

This meeting was organized between four students and an agent from the municipal sustainable development department. Students had prepared their questions, but time was too short to broach all the topics. Traffic circulation problems in town was the first topic of discussion. Students stated the case that more cycle lanes and pedestrian streets were needed in Rouen. In response, the agent told them that store-owners were in need of more parking spaces in front of their shops. However, she said that the city centre policy has changed, the parking duration is shorter and the price higher, to park cars. The number of buses is increasing, and rides were modified to respond to the needs of inhabitants. Students replied that the current rate is very expensive even for them and asked if city councilors would consider lowering rates. Her answer was that this subject would require examination. About urban travel, students suggested encouraging carpooling. The agent mentioned that the mayor pressured staff members to create carpools by setting up an intranet to communicate. Finally, students talked about soft modes of transport for the pupils between school and home. She replied that, “Some pedibuses are organized in partnership with the school, families and the town hall,” and she added that she was aware that this was not enough without really proposing solutions.

Students raised a second topic: wastage at the school cafeteria. The agent explained that a young employee had been hired to investigate this subject; this answer seemed to satisfy the students.

They made a third suggestion: that the school could reduce its carbon footprint by serving a vegetarian lunch once a week. The students found the response disconcerting and frustrating: She told them, “Parents are not ready for that.” (Contemporaneous notes from this meeting are in Additional file 1 .)

The pupils held a separate but similar meeting with another town official, with similar results. The conversations are analyzed in the discussion section.

As we study and reflect on the evidence of the students’ learning from this project, we have discerned two salient themes in their work. First, the collaboration was a crucial component of their learning; and second, they are compelled to take action in the struggle to limit climate change, and they are witnessing the utter failure of the adults’ political systems to treat the problem as the emergency that it is.

Meeting with and teaching kids of another age group was “wonderful”

The students found the cross-age-group meeting wonderful* because they were amazed* by the pupils’ spontaneity and by the depth of knowledge that the younger ones had already learned with their teacher. The pupils were very impressed by the size of the high school and a little intimidated by the older students; however, when the groups were formed, they quickly lost this shyness. *(One student described the first meeting as merveilleux .)

Everyone’s attention was focused on their work. While organizing the final slide show they discussed amongst themselves without any need of adult input. After the presentations, the pupils and students created the list of lifestyle changes; this discussion, too, was very autonomous. The students listened respectfully to suggestions from the pupils, who were glad because the older ones took their ideas seriously. In this situation, it seems that everybody was equal, every idea from each of them allowed the group to seek solutions. They had a unified goal: learning about climate change issues, sharing information and proposing solutions. They all shared the same convictions that society must mobilize against climate change.

The pupils became very aware that the problems of climate change concern everyone, and no matter what one’s age, one can participate and act for the environment. They were able to exchange views with the students about the worldwide climate situation; although they worked mostly on French climate events and information, they could bring their broader understanding to it. They were also able to imagine their future selves because they could see that they would become students in just a few years.

Studies abound in the past 20 years’ academic literature, showing that engaging home and family with students’ learning at school increases the student’s investment in their learning and their long term success in school [ 13 , 14 , 15 ]. The conversation our students had with their parents about pro-climate actions they could take as a family is an example of the way that this project contributed to family engagement in student learning. The parents expressed amazement at the involvement of pupils and students to find solutions to mitigate the consequences of climate change.

Young people feel an urgent need to address climate change-- NOW

Their civic actions (“Taking civic action” section) led the students to a keen awareness that the slow pace of adults’ willingness to make change is deepening the injustices caused by climate change (“Youth sense of climate injustices” section), and is woefully insufficient (“Frustration with slow pace of adult leadership” section) for the current crisis.

Taking civic action

As the students in this collaboration learned about the unsustainable nature of the accumulating repercussions of climate change, they developed a pressing desire to take civic action. As one student said, “This is our present and our future.” Youths see that their own future, indeed the future of the world’s population is here, now. There is no time to waste.

Both groups of our students decided to “think globally and act locally” by taking their proposals to two different town hall officials. In both cases, the government official listened sympathetically, then tried to explain that changes cannot happen overnight, and must go through channels of the political system. Here are sample responses to the student’s requests:

For lower bus fares: “The topic requires study.”

For bike lanes for safer passage to school: “The store-owners’ desire more parking spaces, so bike lanes aren’t easily created in town.”

For the city to encourage carpooling: “The mayor encourages it for town employees, but we recognize this is not enough.”

To address school lunchroom food waste: “A young person has been hired to investigate this subject.”

To the proposal to serve meatless lunch 1 day per week to reduce the school’s carbon footprint: “Parents are not ready for that.” [The students didn’t challenge this assumption, but certainly could have.]

The pupils took their similar positions to a different town hall agent. They inquired about the possibility of getting bicycle trails established so they could ride their bikes to school safely. His response: “This is “under study--but it doesn’t depend solely on the mayor’s office/town hall government, and it is complicated to create bike paths where there had not been foresight to make a place for them when the roads were originally constructed.”

The children did achieve two small victories in their attempts to influence local environmental policies. They wanted to raise awareness among their fellow students against food waste at the school lunchroom. This demand was granted, and the class delegates from now on can participate in school lunch planning groups in the school that take place every trimester. The pupils created an informative poster campaign to educate their peers.

Following the presentation of their project to the town hall agent, the pupil municipal councilors worked on installing pollinator gardens at school and around town, with the goal of promoting biodiversity. They also posted informative signs about beneficial insects that inhabit these municipal gardens.

Youth sense of climate injustices

All the students expressed a desire “to understand the causes and consequences of climate change in order to mobilize against it.” By studying the causes of climate change, the youth learned that human activities have impacts on the environment. They understood that CC would affect not only their lives but also the lives of people in poorer countries, with even more disastrous consequences: desertification, depletion of water resources, salinization of soil, rising ocean levels.

They learned that the hardships of climate change are falling first upon regions where the people have few or no resources to struggle for survival through these impending crises. This knowledge raised their awareness of the world-leaders’ failure to address climate change with any urgency for the sake of environmental justice and addressing human suffering. The students began to sense that they have a stronger moral compass than adult politicians, when it comes to speaking out for climate justice to ameliorate the suffering of the world’s less resourced people.

In the last week of the project, the students visited an exhibition on the Amazon rainforest. Both the students and the pupils wondered, “Why should we worry about the Amazon rainforest?” At the exhibit they learned that the forest is an asset for the storage of greenhouse gases. Nevertheless, it is destroyed to plant crops and breed cattle, which both release yet more methane. As the children see it, “Everyone knows but nobody does anything.” It is really difficult for young people to understand why adults do not take responsibility in the face of this disaster.

Frustration with slow pace of adult leadership

During one of the slide presentations, a pupil lamented, “The polar bears will disappear!” Young people feel deep emotional ties with animals in general, and charismatic animals like polar bears, pandas, and whales particularly evoke these feelings. The students learned that Earth is going through a sixth major biological extinction crisis. They know that during geological time there have already been large-scale extinctions which were due to natural causes. They also know that the species that survived these crises have diversified. However, they learned that this current crisis has anthropogenic causes and is occurring faster than past ones. Once again, they wonder why adults won’t act swiftly and decisively to halt this extinction crisis.

As they learned about the world leaders’ responses to climate change (or lack thereof), one of the students stated with dismay, “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created at the end of 1988 and almost nothing has been done. We need more rapid change to respond to the urgency of climate change.” They inquired, “Why did adults not react sooner and why are their actions still only moderate? Why is there a gap between what adults say and what they actually do?” Sylvie Granon, researcher at neurosciences institute in Paris-Saclay, who is co-writer of a chapter in the book “ Le Souci de la nature ” suggests the reason adults may be so slow to respond attributes blame to the human brain: “ Le changement est extrêmement énergivore et stressant pour l’organisme, qui va essayer de diminuer l’impact de ce stress en adoptant les comportements les plus automatiques et les plus rassurants possible.” (Translation: Change is extremely energy-consuming and stressful for organisms, which try to diminish the impact of this stress by adopting automatic habitual behaviors which serve to reassure as much as possible) [ 16 ]. This is not meant to excuse the leaders’ slow response, but merely as a possible explanation for it. The young generation is more clear-headed and realistic about the urgency of the problem than the adults who make the laws and affect their future.

The slow, politically motivated adult tactics in the face of what the students see as a blazing emergency frustrate young people wherever they try to sound an alarm to awaken adults to the problem, as seen in other articles in this collection (Luna and Mearman; Burke et al.) [ 17 , 18 ] and around the world in youth climate movements [ 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ]. As one young German activist states,

“What the world community is doing with the planet, will be described one day as the biggest political failure of our time.” [ 20 ]

This aptly describes how our students felt after their encounters with adults in charge at the municipal level, and after studying about the painfully slow processes of change as world leaders quibble over details of climate agreements. And it has been laid at the young people’s doorstep. Their generation did not cause the problems but in their adult lifetimes the bill is coming due for the neglect of the preceding ones. A political failure, indeed; and an economic and humanitarian disaster of global proportions are the burdens today’s youth, as tomorrow’s leaders, will have to confront.

The aim of this collaborative learning project was to engage our students in a learning experience that would make them aware of the challenges of sustainability in our society. We hoped to create an effective way to involve them in sustainability issues at a personal and local level. At the end of this workshop, the students learned that the greenhouse effect is a natural phenomenon but that the increase in greenhouse gases is anthropogenic, or human-caused. From the youngest to the oldest, they understood why a mobilization from simple citizens to elected representatives is necessary, in order to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and find mitigated responses to reduce the consequences of the change already underway.

The solutions proposed by the students of this workshop were to show how each person at their level of skills can have a positive influence on the problem of climate change. Our students judged that the decisions made by adults regarding these problems were not equal to the high stakes for our planet.

Two strong themes emerged from student work products: (1) The collaboration of two age groups proved to be more than the sum of its parts; (2) Unnerved by the slow response from the adult world of politics, the students felt compelled to take immediate personal and civic action to confront climate change.

Cross-age and cross disciplinary collaborations such as this are not easily created in public schools. Sustainable issues are now appearing in the French curriculum at different levels at school, and beginning to involve non-teaching staff, as well (e.g. food services, facilities managers). In primary school, a single classroom teacher teaches all subject matters to the pupils. In secondary schools, any teacher could teach climate change; however, it is mainly science and social studies teachers who incorporate climate curriculum in their courses.

Furthermore, teachers who teach these topics rarely consult each other. Many say that they have no time to collaborate and organize a multi-disciplinary project with their students, although a multitude of studies have shown that cross-disciplinary teaching is an excellent way to create a better learning situation for students; all their lessons are connected and they can understand the real-life links among all the subject areas [ 23 ]. The boundaries between “biology” and “math” and “language arts” evaporate, and learners can create a meaningful schema of how the world functions as an ecosystem.

The project’s significance lies in the students’ ability to make proposals to mobilize the attention of their classmates, their teachers, their parents and adults in general. The teacher’s role is, of course, to allow students to develop knowledge to understand climate change and also to support the various actions often implemented by students to do their part in mitigating its consequences.

This is just one small example of the growth that occurred when two groups of students came together to share their learning about sustainability and take action to confront climate change. The themes we heard in the students’ work products represent only their own experience, but we draw parallels to the voices of other young people the world over who are crying out with the same voice.

One main area for future development is the training of teachers. Even though they have the resources to teach sustainable development issues, many do not feel ready to teach this topic. Teachers may think that teaching sustainable issues is difficult because the content of the curriculum is not clearly identified. They feel that these topics are not the priority for students because no graduation assessments (national exams) in this field exist.

If sustainability is to be part of the school curriculum, pre-service educator training must include skill development in teaching about sustainability in and across subject area ‘silos’. In-service professional development is needed for mid-career teachers, to provide a scientific refresher as well as workshops to model project ideas. School administrators must design schedules with common meeting times so teachers can successfully design integrated projects across disciplines; such collaborations will serve to break down the false disciplinary boundaries and to reduce teachers’ fears about designing new curricular lessons. The conclusion must be optimistic; everyone is now aware of the urgency to take actions to mitigate the consequences of global warming. Even though actions are currently insufficient, the world’s youth urge adults to take responsibility; the temperature is rising, and the increasing frequency of “100-year storms,” glacial-melt floods, arctic jetstream wobbling, wildfires, and droughts all indicate that climate instability has reached crisis level. The faster and stronger we respond, the better for all the world’s creatures.

Availability of data and materials

No data was collected during this journey in civic participation. All relevant materials are included in this article, or as additional files.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the pupils and students who participated in this project.

We thank our inspectors for their listening and support as well as their involvement in sustainable issues: Patrice Favier and Jean-Marc Bellamy. We are also thankful to the ministry of national education in France which awarded this project at the Concours des clés au développement durable during France Climate Week in 2015. It was presented by the Minister of Education, Najat Vallaud Belkasem.

We also offer gratitude to the staff at IFE in Lyon who are involved in the project “tremplin pour l’enseignement des sciences: climat et météo”: Charles-Henri Eyraud, Eric Le Jan, Gérard Vidal.

We also wish to thank the members of the Sustainable Earth guest editorial board who offered feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript, especially David Crookall, Gillian Bowser, and Jaimie Cloud.

Not applicable. This was a public school curricular and extracurricular experience.

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Carole Larose

L’école Edouard Herriot du Mesnil Esnard, Rouen, France

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The co-authors each contributed sections to the account: CL contributed information pertaining to the students’ experiences and work products; CB contributed information about the pupils’ experiences and work products; EB contributed organizational suggestions and English language translations; all three authors contributed to thematic analysis of the results. The author(s) read and approved the final manuscript.

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Carole Larose: Biology and Geology Teacher in a high school (lycée Corneille in Rouen), teacher-trainer in Académie de Rouen; partner-teacher at IFE-ENS-Lyon (Institut Français de l’Education, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon) for the project “Tremplin pour l’enseignement des sciences: climat et météo.” (Springboard for science teaching: climate and weather.)

Christine Blaisot: primary school teacher (École Edouard Herriot Le Mesnil-Esnard); Teacher-trainer especially in Sciences. Membre de l’IREM (Institut de Recherche dans l’Enseignement des Mathématiques) de Rouen.

Eleanor Burke: Lincoln-Sudbury High School Associate Principal, Retired (2017); MA Sustainability and Environmental Management, Harvard University Extension; M.Ed. Bilingual Education, Antioch University; BA. Spanish and Psychology, Duke University, Durham, NC.

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Notes from students’ meeting with town hall official.

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Larose, C., Blaisot, C. & Burke, E. A participatory student workshop on climate change and sustainability: a comparative case study. Sustain Earth 5 , 3 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s42055-022-00048-x

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Handling climate change education at universities: an overview

Walter leal filho.

1 School of Science and the Environment, Manchester Metropolitan University, Chester Street, Manchester, M1 5GD UK

2 Research and Transfer Centre “Sustainable Development and Climate Change Management”, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany

Mihaela Sima

3 Romanian Academy, Institute of Geography, 12 Dimitrie Racovita St, Sector 2, 023993 Bucharest, Romania

Ayyoob Sharifi

4 Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability, Hiroshima University, Higashi-Hiroshima, 739-8530 Japan

Johannes M. Luetz

5 School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia

6 Christian Heritage College (CHC), Brisbane, Australia

7 School of Law and Society, University of the Sunshine Coast (USC), Maroochydore, Australia

Amanda Lange Salvia

8 Graduate Program in Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Passo Fundo, Passo Fundo, Brazil

Mark Mifsud

9 University of Malta, Msida, Malta

Felicia Motunrayo Olooto

10 Department of Agricultural Economics and Extension Services, Faculty of Agriculture, Kwara State University, Malete, PMB 1530, Ilorin, Kwara State Nigeria

Ilija Djekic

11 Faculty of Agriculture, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Republic of Serbia

Rosley Anholon

12 University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil

Izabela Rampasso

13 Universidad Católica del Norte, Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial, Angamos, 0610, Antofagasta, Chile

14 PNPD/CAPES Program, Doctoral Program in Sustainable Management Systems, Federal Fluminense University, Brazil, Passo da Pátria Street, 156, Niterói, Brazil

Felix Kwabena Donkor

15 Department of Geography Education, University of Education Winneba, Winneba, Ghana

Maria Alzira Pimenta Dinis

16 UFP Energy, Environment and Health Research Unit (FP-ENAS), University Fernando Pessoa (UFP), Praça 9 de Abril 349, 4249-004 Porto, Portugal

Maris Klavins

17 Department of Environmental Science, University of Latvia, Raina blvd 19, Riga, LV 1586 Latvia

Göran Finnveden

18 Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Sciences and Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

19 Environmental Sustainability Assessment and Circularity, Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Belvaux, Luxembourg

Martin Munashe Chari

20 Risk and Vulnerability Science Centre (RVSC), Faculty of Science and Agriculture, University of Fort Hare, 1 King William’s Town Road, Private Bag X1314, Alice, 5700 Eastern Cape South Africa

Petra Molthan-Hill

21 Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Alexandra Mifsud

22 Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Salil K. Sen

23 Management Development Institute of Singapore, 501 Stirling Rd, Singapore, 148951 Singapore

24 Indian Institute of Management, Jingkieng, Nongthymmai, Shillong, Meghalaya 793014 India

Erandathie Lokupitiya

25 Department of Zoology and Environment Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Colombo, Colombo 03, Sri Lanka

Associated Data

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Climate change is a problem which is global in nature, and whose effects go across a wide range of disciplines. It is therefore important that this theme is taken into account as part of universities´ teaching and research programs.

A three-tiered approach was used, consisting of a bibliometric analysis, an online survey and a set of case studies, which allow a profile to be built, as to how a sample of universities from 45 countries handle climate change as part of their teaching programs.

This paper reports on a study which aimed at identifying the extent to which matters related to climate change are addressed within the teaching and research practices at universities, with a focus on the training needs of teaching staff. It consists of a bibliometric analysis, combined with an online worldwide survey aimed at ascertaining the degree of involvement from universities in reducing their own carbon footprint, and the ways they offer training provisions on the topic. This is complemented by a set of 12 case studies from universities round the world, illustrating current trends on how universities handle climate change. Apart from reporting on the outcomes of the study, the paper highlights what some universities are doing to handle climate issues, and discusses the implications of the research.

Conclusions

The paper lists some items via which universities may better educate and train their students on how to handle the many challenges posed by climate change.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12302-021-00552-5.

Introduction

Climate change and education.

Universities globally are increasingly recognizing their responsibility to prepare students and society to actively contribute to the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. This role sees universities adopting and promoting carbon neutral goals and practices [ 13 , 24 , 57 ]. Situated within this broader context, contemporary higher education (HE) providers progressively pursue a dual strategy [ 4 ]. First, universities are aiming to become “carbon neutral” institutions by adopting low-carbon operational practices. Second, universities are developing curricula and pedagogical approaches to educate students (and by extension society) about the imperatives of carbon neutrality and climate change mitigation and adaptation. In the literature this dual education has been conceptualized as a critical twin strategy that sees universities concurrently reduce their own “carbon footprint” (by aiming for net-zero emissions of institution-linked greenhouse gasses) and expanding the societal “carbon brainprint” (by teaching knowledge and skills in the area of carbon neutral practices) [ 4 , 11 , 24 ] (Fig.  1 ). As such, HE providers have a vital role to play in educating future environmental auditors, community organizers, corporate managers, engineers, practitioners, technical professionals, policymakers and, most significantly, the community about actions that can be taken to mitigate and adapt to climate change, while concurrently propagating social and governance measures. Over time the cumulative build-up of societal awareness progressively permeates and influences the practices of the corporate sector, community stakeholders and local and national governments on how to better manage climate change mitigation and adaptation in their diverse spheres of influence, including through advocacy, daily behaviors and professional careers [ 13 , 21 , 57 ].

Schematic concept of holistic climate change education at universities comprising research, low-carbon operational practices, forms of educative collaboration with society, and curricula and pedagogy. Figure by authors, based on Chatterton et al. [ 11 ] and Baumber et al. [ 4 ]

While universities are thus recognizing their responsibility to progressively prioritize carbon neutrality and develop climate change modules in educational content, efforts can sometimes be stymied by organizational inertia, operational complexity and a plethora of regulatory requirements that impinge on governance in the higher education sector [ 39 , 57 ].

Climate change education (CCE) at universities may take the form of both formal, informal, and non-formal learning and teaching approaches, including nature-immersive field projects, international case studies and higher degree research (HDR), among others [ 39 , 40 , 69 ]. Literary analysis of university education on climate change and sustainability has reflected a gradual shift globally over the past decade away from a narrow preoccupation in curricula on environmental protection toward broader objectives and creative educational approaches. These initiatives include corporate social responsibility (CSR), multiculturality and ethics. They also manifest as renewable energy, recyclable resources, campus greening, embodied pedagogies, and nature-immersive outdoor education, among others [ 8 , 35 , 47 , 70 ]. Molthan-Hill et al. [ 40 ] offer extensive guidance on how to integrate CCE across a wide range of subjects in university curricula, particularly ones with a less direct link to climate science; this guidance is offered from the point of view of content, pedagogy and contextual institutional and sector-wide constraints.

The way forward for universities is to dynamically reposition. This would measurably bridge the gap between generating direct action in the area of carbon neutral education and the creation and dissemination of critical knowledge about climate change that has the potential to proliferate across multiple other sectors [ 11 , 13 ]. Corollary benefits for universities would be evident with significant influence on community leadership. Financial investments would apportion and support economic, environmental and societal value creation. Over recent years engagement in this space has marked an area of growing attention for higher education providers. Instances of universities taking the onus of investing in environmentally sustainable projects to attain sustainability objectives have escalated. Recent trends have additionally seen a growing number of universities globally take decisions to actively divest their endowments from fossil fuel holdings [ 4 , 6 ]. Further, the pathway for climate driven education is integrative, strategic, and progressively embeds the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [ 18 , 60 ].

The Times Higher Education Impact Rankings is a tool used to describe the metrics used by universities in implementing individual UN SDGs [ 51 ]. Among them, SDG 13—climate action—is used. This measures whether universities perform research on climate change, how they use low-carbon energy, and if they have education programs aimed at the achievement of carbon neutrality. The latest list (for 2020) covers 376 universities from 70 countries. The top five universities are in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. These universities are the ones targeted in the current study.

Climate change and universities

The nexus of climate change education.

Climate change and climate variability are principal issues confronting the global community [ 16 ]. The intricate nature of the global climate as an interconnected system, comprising earth and socio-ecological systems, necessitates critical enquiries coupled with reflexive and transformative educational methods [ 68 ]. This may help to address the need for more radical social learning-centered transformation in relation to sustainability concerns and the challenges posed to learning and pedagogy [ 18 ]. There is hence a need to shift from simple content-based, silo approaches of pedagogy to a more systemic and ‘deeper’ enquiry that draws together biophysical, socio-economic and socio-psychological understandings [ 23 , 34 ]. In this light, concepts such as Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), as an integral component of quality education and critical tool for sustainable development has gained global currency [ 62 ]. ESD empowers people to change their thinking and approaches towards a sustainable future. This can be facilitated by enhancing opportunities for quality education on sustainable development [ 15 ]. This will promote social transformation through the redesigning of educational pedagogies and empowering people to build knowledge, skills, values and behaviors critical for sustainable development. This also underscores the need to integrate sustainable development themes, such as climate change within teaching and learning (UNESCO 2020). Efforts are needed from universities around the world to develop advanced curriculum, programs, capacity building and interdisciplinary collaboration in order to support a deeper learning on climate change [ 12 , 48 ].

The SDG final Decade of Action in delivering the global goals

United Nations (UN) studies show that although some progress has been made in a number of the SDGs, there is still substantial work to be done in achieving the SDGs, particularly in the area of redressing social inequity [ 14 , 36 ]. The year 2020 marked the inception point of the Decade of Action to achieve the SDGS by 2030 [ 60 ]. The Decade is a rallying cry for the entire global community to catalyze actions in addressing urgent global challenges—from poverty and gender to climate change, and inequalities. The UN has encouraged all sectors of the society to rally their resources towards the Decade of Action in three core dimensions: global action to achieve effective leadership, improved resources and smarter solutions for realizing the SDGs [ 60 ]. In this regard, education and training will play a critical role. This is more so as climate-induced extreme events have been on the ascendancy across the globe, and argued to be reversing critical developmental gains [ 54 ]. It is important that all the advances and successes concerning the HE for sustainable development are safeguarded as much as possible [ 33 ]. The success of related measures is partly dependent on an informed and proactive citizenry cooperating with other core stakeholders. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are vital stakeholders who function along critical levers in the dynamics of sustainable development [ 53 ]. Furthermore, HEIs represent entrepreneurial spaces where social stakeholders collaborate in knowledge co-production to tackle pressing social issues. This article explores some of the ways higher education institutions can show leadership in climate education and research practices, as well as the inherent opportunities that can be upscaled in a post-COVID era for sustainability.

Methodology

The paper aims to identify how matters related to climate change are tackled at universities both in teaching and research, with a focus on the training needs of teaching staff. It is developed in three directions: a bibliometric analysis, an online worldwide survey aimed at ascertaining the degree of involvement from universities to offer training provisions on the topic and a set of 12 case studies from universities round the world, illustrating current trends on how they handle climate change in teaching and research. These methods are mutually complementary for 3 main reasons: they provide an overview of the recent and current literature and their focus (bibliometric analysis); they enable the identification of trends among academic staff (the survey), and they cater for the provisions of real life examples illustrating how climate change is being implemented in university activities (case studies). Table ​ Table1 1 summarizes the purposes of each method and their contribution to this study.

Methods used in the analysis

Bibliometric methods are increasingly used to understand structure and trends of scientific publications. The term co-occurrence analysis is a specific bibliometric analysis method that allows understanding overall structure and thematic focus of scientific fields. Several software tools have been developed over the past few years that can be used for detailed co-occurrence analysis of terms mentioned in publications that are indexed in scientific databases. In this study the VOSviewer has been used, a frequently utilized software tool for bibliometric analyses [ 67 ]. The input data for analysis were bibliometric information of peer-reviewed publications that are indexed in the Web of Science (WoS). WoS was selected for its broad coverage of high-quality scientific publications. It also provides detailed bibliographic information necessary for analysis using the VOSviewer. To collect relevant information from the WoS, a broad-based search string was developed that includes terms related to climate change, universities, and education/training: TS  =  ((“climat* change”) and (“education” or “training” or “curricula” or “curriculum”) AND (“universit*” OR “higher education institut*”)).

The initial search was done on February 26, 2020 and returned 454 articles. After screening these articles to determine their relevance to the aims and objectives of the study, 414 articles remained in the database. In line with the study objectives, the criterion for inclusion in the analysis was addressing issues related to the integration of climate change in the teaching and research practices at universities. The bibliographic data of these articles were downloaded and used for term co-occurrence analysis using VOSviewer. Since multiple variants of a specific term may exist in the articles, a thesaurus file was created to merge synonyms. The output of the term co-occurrence analysis is a network of nodes and links (see Fig.  2 ), where the size of nodes and links indicates the frequency of occurrence and the strength of connections between nodes, respectively. Terms closely linked to each other form clusters that are shown in unique colors in Fig.  2 . These clusters are specific thematic areas that will be discussed in the results section.

Output of the term co-occurrence analysis

The methodology of the survey

In order to establish the degree of involvement from universities in reducing their own carbon footprint and to fill in the research gap on how universities around the world handle climate change as part of their teaching programs, a questionnaire survey was undertaken. The questionnaire was part of an international study undertaken by the European School of Sustainability Science and Research (ESSSR) https://esssr.eu/ and the Inter University Sustainable Development Research Programme (IUSDRP) https://www.hawhamburg.de/ftz-nk/programme/iusdrp.html , aimed at identifying knowledge gaps on CCE at universities.

The first list of items was reviewed by the authors to minimize redundancies and similar items and to ensure that all important questions were added. The questionnaire survey was pre-tested by a panel of academics within sustainability areas at different universities.

The main target group of the questionnaire was the university staff involved in teaching and/or research at the university, who already integrated climate change-related aspects in a course at the university. The target individuals were identified through a number of mailing lists, including the European School of Sustainability Science and Research mailing list ( https://esssr.eu/ ), JiscMail ( https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ ) and the Inter-University Program for Sustainable Development Research (IUSDRP) list. The estimated response time was 10 min and no incentives were offered for questionnaire completion. At the end, 129 participants from 45 countries participated in the survey. The questionnaire was composed of 22 items, mainly closed-ended questions, divided into 3 major sections (Additional file 1 : Appendix S1). The questions were formulated based on the authors’ knowledge and experience in terms of CCE, but also considering the results and training needs identified in other studies, targeting a single university or global studies (e.g., [ 26 , 30 , 43 , 48 , 61 ]). The first section aimed to gather information regarding the background of the participants: gender, age, university and the role at the university, the scientific domain and if the respondent is teaching or not climate change issues at the university. The second section of the survey, being devoted to the staff members in a university who integrated climate change-related aspects in a course, aimed to gather information on the perceived level of training of the teacher: climate change topics of the course, for which the teacher needs more training, the level of expertise to teach the course, how this was obtained and which sources of information are used to develop the content of the course. The item 14 of the questionnaire was composed of 13 statements assessing the perceived level of efficiency of the most important means to promote CCE. The assessment was made using a Likert-type scale (1—strongly disagree, 2—disagree, 3—no opinion, 4—agree, 5—strongly agree). Statistical processing was performed employing a two-stage cluster analysis to classify attitudes of respondents towards these statements. In this respect, a solution with two clusters was chosen using country/continent from where the respondents/university come from, their gender, age, staff role at the university and frequency of sciences as categorical variables. The difference between the two clusters was determined using the Mann–Whitney U test ( p  < 0.05).

The third section investigated the challenges and drivers of implementing climate change-related initiatives at the university level, aiming to assess the drivers and their potential. Two open-ended questions gave the possibility to the respondent to further emphasize through deeper understanding how the university could address the training needs on CCE. The validity of the data is further assured as it derived from bona fide academic institutions and supplied by well-informed sources. The reliability of data is also assured, since those who replied are very familiar with the concept of sustainability and have an understanding of the emphasis to this topic in their own institutions.

Case-studies selection

In order to reveal how climate change is implemented by universities, mainly through teaching and research, a literature review has been performed. In parallel with covering climate change in bachelors/masters/PhD curriculum, they cover this topic through the following approaches: (i) by delivering different training events; (ii) by means of various public initiatives including workshops and conferences; (iii) by conducting specific research activities.

The selection of 12 universities as case studies was based on two criteria—ranking and geographic location. Criteria #1 was based on Academic Ranking of World Universities 2020 ( http://www.shanghairanking.com/index.html ), three universities from top 100, four universities from ranked between 101 and 1000; five universities out of list. Criteria #2 was based on the geographic location of universities: five from Europe; three from North America; four from other parts of the world.

Results and discussion

A. the results of bibliometric analysis.

Results of the term co-occurrence analysis using VOSviewer allow us to identify what issues related to CCE have received more attention in the literature. These results (Fig.  2 ) show that, in addition to the search terms (i.e., climate change, education, universities, HE, and curriculum), terms such as adaptation, perceptions, science, management, policy, and several terms related to mitigation have received more attention. In other words, these terms have occurred more frequently in the reviewed literature, indicating that issues related to them have been more studied. Better understanding can be achieved by looking into the five major thematic clusters identified by the analysis that are shown in different colors in Fig.  2 . These clusters show the major thematic focus of the existing literature and are, in descending order of importance, focused on climate change adaptation, sustainability and climate change mitigation, institutional aspects, challenges and barriers, and curriculum reform.

In the largest cluster (in red) terms related to climate change adaptation are dominant. This indicates the recognition of the significance of integrating knowledge about climate change adaptation in university education. In fact, communicating the potential risks posed by climate change is critical and has been well recognized in the literature [ 42 ]. It is believed that risk communication, overcoming misconceptions, and enhancing knowledge regarding adaptation strategies can contribute to better response to climatic threats in the long run [ 3 , 42 ].

The second largest cluster (in green) is dominated by terms related to sustainability and climate change mitigation. It is increasingly recognized that CCE should be an integral part of efforts aimed at ESD [ 2 , 38 , 45 ]. Considering the central position of mitigation in climate change efforts and policies, and since the energy and water sectors are major contributors to climate change, there has been increasing attention to issues related to their efficient management [ 28 ]. The emphasis on the climate–energy nexus has highlighted the need for responsible consumption, and extension of efficient energy systems based on renewable energy technologies [ 28 ]. It is demonstrated that enhancing mitigation knowledge through CCE programs can make significant contributions to reducing lifetime emissions of individuals [ 13 ]. This cluster also includes the term “water resources” that, considering the water–energy nexus, may indicate the importance of appropriate and efficient water resource management for achieving climate change mitigation targets [ 49 ]. Water resource management is also essential for climate change adaptation.

Results also highlight the significance of CCE for better community engagement and for facilitating institutional transformations (blue cluster). Also, in some cases, institutional reform could be necessary for mainstreaming CCE in university programs. CCE is likely to increase community engagement in mitigation and adaptation efforts and promote pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors [ 7 , 42 ]. Mainstreaming CCE may, however, be challenging as some institutions may resist change [ 7 ]. This highlights the need for institutional transition to facilitate integration of CCE into university programs [ 32 ]. Such institutional reforms and transitions can also facilitate CCE by developing strategic education programs and providing training programs to enhance competency of teaching staff [ 1 , 29 ]. Institutional support in terms of, among other things, reforming regulations and fulfilling meeting requirements is also critical for addressing other challenges that may make it difficult to mainstream CCE into universities ‘education agenda.

The purple cluster in Fig.  2 highlights some of these barriers. One major challenge is that, traditionally, there has been a tendency towards disciplinary and silo-based education in universities. This is not conducive to CCE that requires inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches and collaboration between different fields and with various stakeholders [ 20 , 29 ]. In this regard, institutional support through development of platforms for engagement and collaboration of stakeholders from different fields and/or offering incentives for participating in collaborative and interdisciplinary programs can be effective [ 1 , 5 , 29 , 46 ]. In addition, as in the case of education for sustainable development (ESD), lack of experiences could be a reason for limited integration of CCE [ 46 ]. Accordingly, developing platforms for sharing successful experiences is necessary.

Finally, the presence of terms such as curriculum and students in the last cluster (yellow) is also noteworthy. Curriculum reform is essential since it may not be easy to integrate topics related to climate change into curricula that are traditionally developed along disciplinary lines [ 20 ]. Successful reform of curricula may, however, be challenging as not all students/teachers may favor it [ 25 ]. Therefore, overcoming such challenges is also essential.

b. Results of the survey

A total of 45 developed and developing countries represent the sample of the survey: Australia (3.9%), Bangladesh (2.4%), Brazil (0.8%), Bulgaria (0.8%), Cameroon (0.8%), Canada (1.6%), China (1.6%), Côte d'Ivoire (0.8%), Cyprus (0.8%), Denmark (0.8%), Ethiopia (4.7%), Fiji (0.8%), Finland (0.8%), France (3.1%), Gambia (0.8%), Germany (2.4%), Ghana (4.7%), Guatemala (0.8%), India (4.7%), Iraq (0.8%), Ireland (1.6%), Italy (0.8%), Kenya (1.6%), Malta (0.8%), Mexico (0.8%), Mozambique (0.8%), Niger (0.8%), Nigeria (6.3%), Norway (1.6%), Pakistan (0.8%), Philippines (3.1%), Poland (0.8%), Portugal (3.9%), South Africa (2.4%), Spain (3.1%), Sri Lanka (1.6%), Switzerland (1.6%), Tanzania (0.8%), Thailand (1.6%), Tunisia (0.8%), Uganda (1.6%), United Kingdom (8.7%), United States (15.0%), Uruguay (0.8%), Vietnam (0.8%). Figure  3 presents the worldwide distribution of responses.

Participating countries in the survey

Table ​ Table2 2 presents the sample characteristics. Most participants were male (63.6%), and the dominant knowledge areas were Social Sciences (31.8%) and Environmental and Earth Sciences (28.7%). Almost all age groups had rather balanced participation (between 20 and 27%), except for the youngest group (21 to 30 years old), which had the lowest participation. In terms of role, the permanent positions mainly involved in postgraduate and undergraduate teaching and research were the main ones indicated by the sample (40.3% and 24.8%, respectively). Regarding the university profile and institutional involvement in external climate change projects, research was the most important type of involvement observed (76.7%). Lower levels of responses were provided for community-related programs (45.0%) and teaching/training programs (36.4%). Other types of involvement mentioned were consultancy projects and events open to the public. No involvement was reported by 12.4% of the respondents, and even when the engagement was reported, they generally tend to occur to a moderate extent (41.9%) ( M  = 2.9520, SD = 0.99).

Sample characteristics

a Other include: Agricultural Economics; Agroforestry and Forestry; Architecture and Urban Studies; Climate and Society; Climate Variability and Change; Coping/Adaptation Strategies, Modeling; Consulting; Education; Education for Sustainable Development; Energy science; Entrepreneurship Education; Environmental and Resource Economics; Environmental Economics; Environmental Health Science; Environmental Law; Environmental Sociology; Environmental studies (not science; studies in interdisciplinary); Student's Union; Sustainable Development and Business; Urban Planning

When asked if they teach climate change-related aspects in a course at the university, 77.5% responded positively (Additional file 2 : Appendix S2 presents the list of courses taught as indicated by the sample). On the other hand, only 58.1% of the respondents indicated that climate change-related aspects are included in the course guidelines. The others either do not teach the topic (16.3%) or include these aspects in the teaching, even though not having the course guidelines (24.8%).

Table ​ Table3 3 presents a comparison between aspects of climate change mostly addressed by the courses taught by the sample and their training needs. The same list of aspects was presented and assessed in two different questions. As expected, the aspects of climate change mitigation and adaptation, and social and environmental impacts were addressed mainly by the courses, while the lowest rates were observed for ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) reporting, climate diplomacy and climate leadership. In terms of more training needed by the educators, around one third of the sample indicated topics as projections of future climate change, the economics of climate change and climate governance. The least indicated topics include climate change mitigation and SDG 13.

Table 3

Comparison between aspects of climate change mostly addressed by the courses taught by the sample and their training needs

Other aspects listed by the sample in the additional open option as already being included in teaching cover a wide range of perspectives and topics: carbon trading, carbon footprinting, greenhouse gas inventorying, climate change impacts, climate and gender, climate change communication, climate finance, climate justice, leadership in sustainability, among others. In terms of the areas where the respondents need further training, the listed topics include: communication strategy, health impacts, history of climate change, how to educate in response to climate change, justice and equity impacts of climate change, keep on track with various information bases, public engagement, countering climate change denialism.

Figure  4 presents the responses for two of the survey questions: “Do you feel prepared to teach climate change-related concepts?” and “Have you received or pursued training on matters related to climate change?”. More than half of the participants indicated that they feel prepared to teach the topic to a great or very great extent. Similarly, around 53% of the respondents said they already received or pursued training on climate change.

Sample perceived preparation to teach climate change-related concepts ( left ) and received/pursued training on climate change ( right ) (in percentage of responses)

The questionnaire also focused on the primary sources the academic staff rely on to develop the content of courses. Scientific articles were the most indicated option (85.5%), followed by Internet-based resources (69.8%), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment reports (68.2%), own research (62.0%) and reports elaborated by other global organizations (58.1%). Printed books were also in the list (39.5%). Almost 10% of the respondents used the additional option to include other sources, such as national assessments of climate change projections and impacts, findings from other project research, the course textbook, workshops, conferences, and webinars.

Table ​ Table4 4 points out the efficiency of the means to promote CCE as stated by the respondents. The highest mean is observed for problem-based learning, followed by experiential learning and fieldwork. Online courses received the lowest mean, indicating probably the need for more developments in this area to support efficiency towards teaching and learning. In courses on climate change, the sample supported the need for placing specific emphasis on problem-based learning (48.1%), behavior change (37.2%), nature-based learning (36.4%), experiential learning (36.4%), cognitive learning (30.2%), and Socio-emotional aspects (30.2%).

Perceived efficiency of the most important means to promote CCE (1—not efficient, 2—somewhat efficient, 3—efficient, 4—very efficient, 5—extremely efficient) ( N  = number,  M  = mean, SD  = standard deviation)

When focusing on climate change and several aspects in the training process involving the universities, the academic staff generally showed a high level of agreement with the presented statements (Table ​ (Table5). 5 ). Based on the Likert scale used (from 1 'strongly disagree' to 5 'strongly agree’), respondents in both identified clusters agree that universities should offer space for climate change education, that climate change is a real concern for the country and that there is a growing demand for experts and professionals in climate change (Table ​ (Table5, 5 , scores above 4). On the other side, respondents have a neutral opinion with the statements referring that the university has properly embedded climate change into teaching and learning activities and offers nature-based/nature-immersive courses to cultivate care for the environment (Table ​ (Table5, 5 , scores around 3). Finally, the sample of respondents does not agree whether there is lot of skepticism related to climate change among students, as this topic had the lowest agreement mean (Table ​ (Table5, 5 , scores below 3).

Description of the two clusters in terms of country/continent, gender, age, staff role and knowledge area ( N  = 129)

The mean ± standard deviations (M ± SD) values 1 were obtained from the raw data. Note: Items denoted with different letters are significantly different at the level of 5%

Likert scale: (1) “Strongly disagree”, (2) “Disagree”, (3) “No opinion”, (4) “Agree”, (5) “Strongly agree”

The cluster analysis revealed two clusters, based on the scores presented in Table ​ Table5, 5 , that can be identified as “climate active universities” and “less climate active universities”. The first cluster mainly consists of respondents/universities from Asia, Africa, Americas and Australia and some western and Northern European countries, of higher ages (above 50 years of age), mainly engaged in teaching and research. Opposed to them, the demographic structure of “less climate active universities” are mainly from Europe (mainly from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe) and some institutions in Africa, with an age below 50 and respondents that are engaged either only as teachers or only as researchers. Out of 13 statements, for nine there are statistically significant differences between the clusters ( p  < 0.05, denoted with different letters in Table ​ Table5 5 ).

While the respondents in both clusters scored almost equally for the first two statements (climate change is a real concern for the country and that the university should offer space for CC, p  > 0.05), the first group of “climate active universities” showed a higher agreement (scores around 4) with the statements referring to the awareness in terms of climate-related initiatives (research units, programs) undertaken by the university, but also with the statements that there is a growing demand for experts and professionals in climate change, thus climate change is likely to increase in the future and to the fact that students are keen to receive training on CC. For the same statements, there is a low agreement (scores around 2) for the group named “less climate active universities”. Both clusters express the same level of disagreement associated with skepticism related to climate change among students ( p  > 0.05) and the same level of agreement that climate change literacy enables better career pathways ( p  > 0.05).

As far as challenges and drivers to implementing CCE are concerned, Fig.  5 summarizes the sample views. Lack of funding for climate-related research was the most indicated challenge (by roughly 63% of the sample—of this number, two-thirds from developing countries). Lack of staff expertise had also a high response (over 50%), supporting the need for further climate change training. On the other hand, lack of students’ interest does not seem to be a considerable challenge (15.5%). Other challenges mentioned by the sample (11%) in the open space consist of lack of internal resources for scientific development, lack of leadership from highest campus officials, lack of progression between climate-related courses, lack of diversity in faculty expertise, lack of targeted on-job short to medium term trainings on climate change and related issues, lack of internship opportunities for students to develop their practical skills on climate change solutions, lack of will to pursue CCE against all odds, and religious or political perspectives.

Challenges ( above ) and Drivers ( below ) to implementing CCE at the respondents ‘ universities (in percentage of responses)

As for drivers, additional resources dedicated to CCE (selected by 71.3% of the sample) were perceived as fundamental for improvements in this area, followed by national guidelines to address climate change in the curricula (63.6%) and the increased attractiveness to students (62.8%). Pressure from stakeholders and/or local communities does not seem to be an essential driver, as it was indicated by around half of the respondents. Other drivers were indicated by less than 7% of the respondents, and include being relevant in global discourse on climate issues, competition among universities in terms of courses offered to their graduates, increased job opportunities directly arising from climate change concerns in businesses and communities, organized faculty support, personal motivation, potential national and international collaborations with research institutions and academic institutes, as well as any non-governmental organizations, and the existence of local (e.g., state) guidelines to address climate change in the curricula.

The last survey questions referred to the perceived potential for CCE in the following years and how it could be addressed. In general, the sample saw potential on the topic ( M  = 3.8281; SD = 0.89715), with over 90% of the respondents spread around the positive response options (26.4% to a moderate extent, 43.4% to a great extent, and 23.3% to a very great extent). A total of 93 respondents (out of 129) used the open space (response was not mandatory) to describe how training needs on CCE can be addressed at the university level.

By coding the responses against the major themes, several aspects were identified as having the highest frequency (proportionally represented in Fig.  6 ), being the significant needs in terms of climate change at universities. The main one identified by the respondents is related to the courses, either by introducing climate change aspects in the existing courses, or designing new interdisciplinary courses. Even the importance of online courses was raised in this respect. Another main need was the curriculum in terms of introducing a flexible and interdisciplinary curriculum, embedding deeply the climate change aspects and allocating more time for them, following by the need to increase staff training and capacity. With a lower frequency, research in terms of funding projects related to climate change was mentioned by the respondents, but also the need to enhance the partnership, collaboration and exchange between the universities, to design specialized university programs, and to organize various events as workshops, seminars and conferences. Some respondents also mentioned community outreach activities, the involvement of students and creating special departments on climate change as being relevant actions to address the climate change needs at universities.

The major themes for training needs in terms of CCE at universities identified by the participants in the survey

These identified needs are also the main instruments used by the 12 selected universities analyzed in the paper to develop climate change actions. The results of the survey are also in line with the challenges to CCE identified in the literature review part of the paper: the strong need identified in the previous publication for institutional support to integrate CCE into the university programs [ 32 ], but also the curriculum reform to overcome the disciplinary perspective by introducing interdisciplinary courses [ 20 ]. This emphazizes the role of the institutional support to CCE by developing specialized training programs and reforming the curricula, raising the competencies of teaching staff being another theme identified in the literature [ 1 , 29 ]. This is in line with the strong need perceived by the respondents of the survey regarding staff training and increasing the capacity of staff to teach the climate change aspects along various courses.

c. Case-studies analysis

Table ​ Table6 6 summarizes the approach used by 12 universities around the world in terms of developing climate-related actions. It is obvious that development of at least one curriculum at one of the three levels of studies is mostly the first step. Also, universities within their different research projects and activities produce graduate theses (mostly PhDs) that have climate change in focus. As a result of these research activities, universities also organize conferences/workshops and have a growing publication record dedicated to climate change.

Examples of means used by 12 universities around the world in terms of developing climate-related actions

In parallel with teaching and research activities, some universities observe climate change from a wider perspective, providing voluntary training for their staff and students, life-learning and other types of courses to the public, or organizing public activities raising awareness to climate change challenges. In this context, the cases presented in this section have been grouped based on how the selected universities have been addressing the needs for increased and advanced climate change education, as identified in the previous methodological step: (i) accredited teaching programs of all levels of studies and research activities; (ii) various training events focused on staff and/or students; (iii) public initiatives; and (iv) other climate change-related activities.

Accredited teaching programs of all levels of studies and research activities

One of the goals at KTH Royal Institute of Technology [ 31 ] is that all educational programs at all levels should integrated climate action in their curricula so that students after graduation can contribute to achievement of a climate neutral society. The university has an active collaboration with the KTH Student Union and student associations to support them in their work to monitor issues that concern sustainability and climate, among others, within education. Staff in leading teaching roles, such as the Director of First and Second Cycle Education, the Director of Third Cycle Education, program coordinators and individuals on the education committee and the equivalent should undergo training in how sustainable development (including climate issues) can be integrated in educational programs. Currently, in the first, second and third cycle, there are educational programs that have a focus on sustainable development and climate transformation.

At the University of Campinas, there are courses in undergraduate and graduate programs focusing on climate change issues (Geographic Climatology; Climate changes; Global Ecology and Climate Change). Among the topics addressed in these courses, it can be mentioned: effects of climate change on plants, analysis of climate changes, and to analyze at global scale the planet’s system, predicting and understanding environmental changes [ 63 ]. At the University, there are 100 documents presented in the online academic repository focusing on climate change. From them, 11 are PhD thesis and 35 are master dissertation [ 63 ]. Besides, the university has the Center for Meteorological and Climate Research Applied to Agriculture (CEPAGRI). Founded in 1983, the Center performs research on agroclimatology, agrometeorology, ecophysiology, and geotechnologies and provide several information about these themes for population. Studies on climate change are an important focus of CEPAGRI [ 9 ].

In the University of British Columbia (Canada) repository, 85 thesis and dissertations are focused on climate change issues, with 36 PhD thesis and 49 master dissertations. Among these documents, the oldest one was published in 1994: a master dissertation about sea level rising. In 2021, the two PhD thesis published (until April, 2021) were related to the impact of climate change on fish stock/supply [ 56 ].

Starting from 2012, the University of Latvia [ 65 ] has been engaged on climate change and sustainable development which has been advanced since 2014 by the development of a study course "Climate change and sustainable development" offered as elective with over 500 students having these lectures. Since 2018 another course is delivered, entitled "Management of Climate Change". At this institution, over 20 BSC, 8 MSc and one PhD theses have analyzed climate change. Impact of such an initiative has been observed by inviting academics to participate in drafting "Climate Law" (in progress) and National climate policy. In 2021, an international conference on Climate change in teacher education is planned.

Climate change is being addressed at the University Fernando Pessoa [ 59 ] within its PhD program in Earth Sciences, comprising the research branches, Oil Systems and Energy Problems, and Geo-risks, Gas Emissions and Geological Sequestration of CO2, through a specialized Isotherm Laboratory (measuring the capacity of coal as non-conventional reservoir to safety store CO2) to study CO2 sequestration in coal, aiming to contribute to Climate Change minimization. In 2008, a Workshop on “Energy, Greenhouse Gases and Environment” was held in Porto. Actions are being developed since the PhD program in Earth Sciences was officially implemented, in 2009. Until now, four PhD theses associated with climate change have been defended, and 12 peer-reviewed publications.

Similar can be seen at University of Colombo [ 64 ] with climate change courses for students at various levels of studies (Climate Change, Adapting businesses for climate change) and a postgraduate program on 'Climate Change and Environmental Management'. This University was the hosting partner of the International Climate Change Conference 2017 and 2018. Over 500 students have been included in various climate change lectures, with 1 PhD and 13 MSc/BSc (Honors) theses defended, and 12 articles related to climate change published in peer-reviewed journals within the last 5 years.

Within the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee [ 27 ], specific research has targeted climate vulnerability based on land use, soil and climate, temperature and rainfall with urban civic labs incorporating relevant SDGs. Outcome comprises over 20 theses from different levels of studies covering climate change with several publications.

Within its curriculum, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences covers climate change as a topic included in Bachelors and Masters degree programs [ 22 ]. Within the scientific community, research group at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences is editing the world's leading peer-reviewed book series on climate change (the 'Climate Change Management' series) published by Springer which has produced various volumes such as 'Water, Energy and Food Nexus in the Context of Strategies for Climate Change Mitigation', 'Climate Change and the Role of Education or Climate Change, Hazards and Adaptation Options', among others.

Various training events focused on staff and/or students

Hamburg University of Applied Sciences is an example of successful delivering training on climate change for over 3.000 academic staff [ 17 ]. It was organized by the research group “Research and Technology Transfer Sustainability and Climate Change Management” which launched in 2021 a new research on UN SDG13 “The Climate Change and SDG 13 Academic Research and Publications Initiative” [ 22 ].

Ranked in the first position of the [ 51 ] Ranking regarding universities activities related to climate action (SDG 13) [ 52 ], the University of British Columbia (Canada) established a plan to address climate change through actions within their campuses (Climate Action Plan 2030-CAP 2030). Through this plan, the university is engaging its staff and students in the process, providing a channel for them to ask questions, give feedback and actively engage in the actions conducted [ 55 ].

Nottingham Trent University [ 44 ] has run a 'Carbon Literacy Training' supporting staff and students with carbon literacy. It is an offer by the Green Academy at Nottingham Trent University that designed this Climate Education Course and in parallel designed one of the two open-source Carbon Literacy Toolkits for Higher Education (HE) and Universities funded by BEIS for the HE sector in the UK [ 41 ]. In total 13 internal courses have been organized in the last 2 years, with over 250 students and 120 staff participating. Also, this university has offered an online course 'Sustainability in Practice Certificate' (SiP) to all 34.000 students at NTU since 2013, covering all SDGs with a stronger focus on SDG13 added in 2019; 6233 students have completed SiP to date.

In December 2019, KTH Royal Institute of Technology [ 31 ] decided on university-wide climate goals for education, research, collaboration and campus activities. As one of initiatives—all employees at KTH need to have knowledge of climate challenges and actively work to reduce the climate impact based on their role and function at KTH.

Public initiatives

Nottingham Business School, a faculty within Nottingham Trent University, has led the design and distribution of the 'Carbon Literacy Training for Business Schools', which over 400 Academics representing more than 100 business schools in 42 countries worldwide have completed successfully during 2019 and 2020 [ 50 ].

At University of Colombo [ 64 ], awareness programs on climate change have also been conducted for school children, employees at certain institutions, and public (i.e., through public lectures). At campus, awareness is raised by reducing carbon footprint over time, and better waste management.

As a result of an action initiated by administration and students at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) associated with the impact of fossil fuels on climate change [ 10 ], this institution is divesting by the endowment from companies that are developing fossil fuel resources, spreading various types of climate change disinformation and performing anti-climate lobbying by promoting their divestment and organizing Fossil Fuel divestment days [ 37 ].

University of Toronto within its School of Continuing studies (part of a life-learning program) is another example since they launched the course 'Climate Change Policy and Practice' associated with learning the methodology for calculating GHG emissions, GHG reporting and risk management [ 66 ].

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided an additional impulse to new events and activities at universities [ 19 ].

Other climate change-related activities

The University of Fort Hare [ 58 ] has a research center 'Risk & Vulnerability Science Centre' strategically established in 2011 by South Africa’s Department of Science & Innovation. Its main goal is to cope and adapt capacities of rural communities to climate change by improving scientific understanding and developing technologies and innovations to respond to challenges induced by climate change. As a scientific center it has an annual budget to conduct climate change research and since its inception, the budget has been increasing every year. Due to the climate change catastrophes (droughts and floods) experienced in South Africa with more effects being felt within the municipality since 2019, the Centre has performed research collaborations from external local and international funders to tackle climate change issues facing the province. The Centre was selected to conduct climate change awareness workshops for the 2019 National Science Week by the South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement (SAASTA), entitled 'Facing the Harsh Realities of Climate Change'. It also trained 60 unemployed youths on Household Food Security (including growing of climate resilient crops) in the face of climate change through a short learning program, assisted 15 unemployed youths to establish and register 2 cooperatives on crop production of climate resilient crops in South Africa and trained 25 unemployed youths on climate risks and environmental education.

The University of Colombo [ 64 ] applied for the Green Metric award in 2020, and was ranked fourth among the other universities in the country, however, the University of Colombo earned the highest marks for the Energy and Climate Change category. Currently, several climate change-related research projects involving local and international collaborators are underway.

This paper has presented an overview of the extent to which matters related to climate change are tackled within the teaching and research practices at universities, with a focus on the training needs. There is a perceived need for this climate change-related research, since climate change is a major global problem, and knowledge about it is becoming increasingly important for future professionals, who need to be made familiar with strategies for its mitigation and adaptation as part of their university studies. Through a mixed research strategy, which entailed a bibliometric research, a worldwide online survey and case studies, the study shed some light on various aspects related to teaching and further needs on climate change within university programs.

In general, considering the great diversity of results presented in section three, one of the conclusions that can be drawn is that due considerations to CCE in HE courses are perceived by universities as important, since strategies to promote mitigation and adaptation demand multidisciplinary approaches. Also, as highlighted in the survey results, respondents in general reported that in their countries climate change is perceived as a matter of genuine concern, acknowledging that there is a growing demand for professionals with training in this area.

It is a matter of fact that not all universities are fully prepared for addressing climate change in their curricula and further, thus improvements are needed. One of the areas to be improved is in respect of curriculum innovations, i.e., making provisions to include climate change in teaching programs, and in various courses across the spectrum of academic disciplines. To do so, some of the barriers identified in this paper need to be overcome, and one of such barriers is the limitation in the training of teaching staff. In addition, international partnerships for CCE promotion and more opportunities for exchange of experiences among institutions can be highlighted as one of the steps that should be taken, to facilitate curricular innovations.

This study has some limitations. For instance, in the bibliometric analysis, the studied documents were collected via the WoS database and analyzed using the VOSviewer software. Even though the WoS database is one of the most relevant scientific databases in the world, there are others that could have also been used, to offer a comparison. Regarding the VOSviewer software, the parameters used in the analysis, and chosen by the researchers had their scope limited to the main focus of the study, namely on levels of emphasis to CCE. Regarding the survey, the size sample is too small to allow a great generalization of the results. Finally, regarding the case studies, even though 12 of them were analyzed, a greater diversity could provide a wider range of results.

Despite these constraints, the study provides a welcome addition to the literature, since it offers an overview of the training needs related to sustainable development in HE. The sample of 45 countries offers a rough profile of the trends seen today, whereas the case studies illustrate some of the potentials seen in this rapidly growing field.

The implications of this paper and the research performed are threefold. Firstly, it reiterates the growing emphasis universities give to climate change, as documented in the literature. Secondly, it outlines the key role played by training provisions in this process. Thirdly, it showcases examples of successful inclusion of matters related to climate change in university programs, and how some of the challenges may be overcome. Based on the lessons learned, some of the actions universities may adopt to better take into account matters related to climate change are:

• i. A cross-cutting emphasis to climate change, across courses and disciplines;
• ii. Identification of specific strengths and weaknesses in the curriculum for further improvement;
• iii. Greater provisions for training programs for academic staff, so as to encourage them for a greater engagement in this area;
• iv. Build a bridge between climate change teaching and research to maximize the synergies.

As to future studies, it is suggested that further works documenting experiences of curricular innovations for CCE in HEIs in different regions are undertaken, especially in respect of achieving synergies among disciplines.

Due to the urgency of the climate challenges seen today—and expected in the future—this paper argues that no university can afford to ignore this topic. As seen in the results and discussion section, there are many on-going initiatives in respect of climate change teaching, which show it is perfectly feasible to engage in them. Teaching initiatives, combined with climate change research programmes, can make sure that universities are able to make their contribution towards addressing a problem, which is global in nature but whose impacts are mostly felt at the local level.

Acknowledgements

Not applicable.

Authors' contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design, more specifically: conceptualization: WLF; Methodology: AS, MS, ALS, MM, ID, ISR. Formal analysis and investigation: AS, MS, ALS, MM, ID, ISR. Writing—original draft preparation: WLF, MS, AS, JML, ALS, MM, FMO, ID, RA, IR, FD, MAPD, MK, GF, MMC, AM, PM-H, SKS and EL. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

There is no external funding received for the research included in the manuscript.

Availability of data and materials

Declarations.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publisher's Note

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Contributor Information

Walter Leal Filho, Email: [email protected] .

Mihaela Sima, Email: moc.oohay@kimamis .

Ayyoob Sharifi, Email: pj.ca.u-amihsorih@ifirahS .

Johannes M. Luetz, Email: ua.ude.chc@zteulj .

Amanda Lange Salvia, Email: moc.liamg@aivlasadnama .

Mark Mifsud, Email: [email protected] .

Felicia Motunrayo Olooto, Email: moc.liamg@otoolomaicilef .

Ilija Djekic, Email: sr.ca.gb.firga@cikejdi .

Rosley Anholon, Email: rb.pmacinu@yelsor .

Izabela Rampasso, Email: moc.liamg@ossapmarazi .

Felix Kwabena Donkor, Email: ku.oc.oohay@2002roknodxilef .

Maria Alzira Pimenta Dinis, Email: tp.ude.pfu@sinidam .

Maris Klavins, Email: [email protected] .

Göran Finnveden, Email: es.htk@ifnarog .

Martin Munashe Chari, Email: az.ca.hfu@irahcm .

Petra Molthan-Hill, Email: [email protected] .

Alexandra Mifsud, Email: [email protected] .

Salil K. Sen, Email: gs.ude.sidm.rerutcel@sk_lilas , Email: [email protected] .

Erandathie Lokupitiya, Email: kl.ca.bmc.ics@idnare .

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• Published: 03 November 2023

Towards a greater engagement of universities in addressing climate change challenges

• Walter Leal Filho   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1241-5225 1 , 2 ,
• Sebastian Weissenberger 3 ,
• Johannes M. Luetz 4 , 5 , 6 ,
• Javier Sierra 2 , 7 ,
• Izabela Simon Rampasso 8 ,
• Ayyoob Sharifi 9 , 10 ,
• Rosley Anholon 11 ,
• Joao Henrique Paulinho Pires Eustachio 2 &
• Marina Kovaleva 2  

Scientific Reports volume  13 , Article number:  19030 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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• Climate change
• Environmental impact

Many higher education institutions around the world are engaged in efforts to tackle climate change. This takes place by not only reducing their own carbon footprint but also by educating future leaders and contributing valuable research and expertise to the global effort to combat climate change. However, there is a need for studies that identify the nature of their engagement on the topic, and the extent to which they are contributing towards addressing the many problems associated with climate change. Against this background, this paper describes a study that consisted of a review of the literature and the use of case studies, which outline the importance of university engagement in climate change and describe its main features. The study identified the fact that even though climate change is a matter of great relevance to universities, its coverage in university programmes is not as wide as one could expect. Based on the findings, the paper also lists the challenges associated with the inclusion of climate change in university programmes. Finally, it describes some of the measures which may be deployed in order to maximise the contribution of higher education towards handling the challenges associated with a changing climate.

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Introduction.

Many universities worldwide are continuously showing their commitment to preparing students for a role in society where they can contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation 1 . Education plays an important role in changing people's behaviour and attitudes; young people in the classrooms can learn about the impacts of climate change and how to mitigate and adapt to it, and they can be motivated to act 2 . The university’s role in relation to climate change education is critical in addressing scientific, environmental, social, and political challenges. Future decision-makers need to make their decisions from an informed position, and for this reason, climate change education and research programmes are of major importance 3 . Higher education institutions (HEIs) are part of both the solution and the problem regarding climate change 4 . By becoming actively engaged in efforts against climate change, HEIs can provide research-based and educational solutions to identify the most critical climate impacts and ways to handle them. Institutions can operate as hubs by creating, testing, and disseminating information about climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. Furthermore, HEI often undertakes research activities and seize upon opportunities to generate innovative knowledge that can help their local communities to adapt to climate change 5 . They deliver significant engagement and provide a platform for designing, testing and implementing innovative practices which may help in efforts to address the many impacts of climate change, locally, nationally, and globally. For instance, universities are among the key players in exploring and developing effective carbon pricing solutions including their economic feasibility and stimulating investments to reduce the technologies’ costs 6 . In the light of additional pressure posed by climate change on healthcare systems worldwide, it is essential to strengthen educational and training programs by introducing ‘climate change’ into medical school curricula and students’ activities. This will ensure that graduate health professionals acquire knowledge and skills to diagnose and respond to the health threats and impacts of climate change and understand public health issues 7 , 8 . Another role universities play in affecting climate action-related transformational change is through their engagement in advocacy and activism 9 . For instance, in the United States and Canada HEI have been involved in the fossil fuel divestment (FFD) 10 , 11 . In the United States, campaigns, primarily led by students, focus on justice including social, environmental, and economic issues 10 . In Canada, the campaigns use the signing of sit-ins, petitions, protests and rallies as well as branding and messaging from international environmental organizations 11 .

On the other hand, universities are contributors to climate change and hence, often feel an obligation to address individual impacts by greening their campuses. Many HEIs around the world have adopted initiatives such as the ‘carbon neutral university’ converting to low-emission or carbon–neutral organisations. As examples of these initiatives, the University for Sustainable Development in Eberswalde and Leuphana University both in Germany, are on a path to becoming carbon–neutral 12 . Others are engaging in initiatives to handle climate change as part of their efforts in the field of sustainable development 13 . In addition to carbon neutrality and waste management, universities aim to improve materials and resource use efficiency, environmental quality, retrofitting residential and non-residential construction buildings, and increase green areas and use of green transportation. For instance, Arizona State University, one of the largest public universities in the USA, with almost 100,000 students and employees, reported the achievement of carbon neutrality in 2019 14 . Development of green campuses in China focuses on energy and resource efficiency through introducing energy-saving technology in campus buildings and facilities, energy statistics and auditing, as well as energy-saving operations. All these initiatives are strongly supported by the national government through policies and financial tools 15 . In Italy, the largest campus in the country of the University of Calabria (UNICAL) has significantly improved its energy systems through the use of photovoltaic, solar, and geothermal energy produced on campus 16 . Additionally, by introducing internal carbon pricing, universities could demonstrate practical implications for emission reduction through waste management 17 and energy use 18 . Climate change education and approaches to greening campuses are also considered among the university's strategies to contribute to sustainable development 19 . The strong linkage between these fields contributes to overcoming challenges in attaining the goals of the other. Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 13, particularly Target 13.3, aims at “improving education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction, and early warning”. Furthermore, the wide range of initiatives launched to foster climate change literacy and education including the UNESCO Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development Programme 20 . The program contributed to advancing such topics as sustainable development and climate change in national curricula and educational standards across the countries 21 .

Most of the current studies report on one or several aspects concerning HEIs efforts to tackle climate change, like the aforementioned examples. Therefore, there is a need for studies that identify the overall nature of HEIs participation, and the extent to which they are contributing towards addressing the many problems associated with climate change. This paper explores universities' engagement in addressing the threats posed by climate change, its main features, potential measures towards its maximisation, and associated challenges worldwide. To achieve this goal, this research consisted of a review of the literature and the use of case studies, which outline the importance of university engagement in climate change and describe its main features. The consequent sections describe methods used, obtained results, and lessons learned. The paper concludes by summarising the main findings and describing measures that higher education institutions should deploy in the long term, to better address climate change.

The objective of this study is to find out what climate change-related themes and topics have been pursued by universities. One way to answer this question is to examine publications that have focused on issues related to climate change education and research programs and initiatives in academic institutions. For this purpose, we relied on bibliometric analysis techniques as they can highlight key terms that have been used in the literature and their interactions. Various software tools such as CiteSpace, SciMAT, and VOSviewer are available for bibliometric analysis. Here, we used the latter as its term co-occurrence maps are more detailed and easier to interpret 22 , 23 . The input data for bibliometric analysis can be obtained from academic literature databases such as Scopus and the Web of Science. In this study, we used the Web of Science for its reputation to index quality peer-reviewed literature. To retrieve relevant literature for inclusion in the analysis, we developed a search string that is a combination of terms related to climate change, impacts of climate change, teaching and research programs, and academic institutions.

The full search string is available in the “ Appendix ”. It was created to embrace the main topics related to this research (inclusion criteria), with a structure of four main blocks. The first is related to terms related to climate change and encompasses variations commonly used in the literature such as ‘global warming’, ‘climate variability’, etc. The second block of terms is related to ‘extreme events’, while the third brings some practices of universities such as education, teaching, training, curricula, research, etc. Finally, the last section of the search string was created due to the focus selected in this study, which is to understand the perspective of higher education institutions. It is worth considering, however, that the terms chosen might now encompass the totality of possible terms related to climate change since there is a huge variety used throughout the literature. The authors are aware of this issue and brought this discussion as a limitation in the conclusions section.

The initial literature search was conducted on July 18, 2022, and returned 1214 documents. These documents were screened to only include those that show how climate change education and/or research is pursued by universities (exclusion criteria). At the end of the screening process. A total of 794 documents remained in the database and were used for term co-occurrence analysis in VOSviewer. The co-occurrence analysis was done in several steps to ensure obtaining the most accurate outputs. To be more specific, after the initial analysis, we found out many synonyms need to be merged (e.g., ‘climate change’ and ‘climate-change’). For this purpose, we developed a thesaurus file and added it to the software. The process was repeated until no synonyms were found in the output. The final output (Fig.  1 ) is a network of nodes and links, where node size is proportional to the occurrence to frequency (of terms) and link width is proportional to the strength of connections between terms. Closely connected terms form clusters that can be interpreted as major thematic areas that have received relatively more attention in the literature. In this perspective, it was possible to label clusters manually since the number of clusters formed and the terms extracted were manageable. To label the clusters, the authors analysed the relationship of terms of a specific cluster and provided a label representing the discussion embedded in each one of the clusters 24 . These will be further explained in the results section.

Results of the term co-occurrence analysis.

In addition to this, we completed the literature review by selecting a set of key case studies regarding four core areas for university engagement, namely (1) research and development, (2) teaching and learning, (3) governance and operations, and (4) civic engagement and community outreach. We performed a literature mapping using the Web of Science database to identify the case studies. This was completed using a general search using Google and recognised case studies implemented by universities in different countries. Relevant case studies were selected by the research team using the following criteria: number of citations, degree of innovation, diversity of knowledge and research areas, geographical diversity, and potential for replication and mainstreaming in other contexts. Four tables were designed with selected examples, which entail a specific set of information, namely the type of climate change work undertaken, the main purpose of the implemented initiative, the name of the participating universities, and the country. Also, to ensure the tracing of the information, the tables contain bibliographical references or web links. This also allows a cross-check of the information and enables readers to obtain further details.

Using this literature mapping approach identified, collected, and analysed the existing literature on specific case studies of interest. This process made it possible to highlight and synthesise key issues from the selected literature, thus providing clear insights into the state of knowledge on key case study topics. Accordingly, literature mapping conceptualised a range of possible future research directions, policy implications, and/or practical recommendations for different stakeholder groups. Crucially, surveying the state of the art in this manner helped the researchers to avoid duplicating previous work, identify areas where further investigation is needed, and enable the development of strategies for evidence-based decision-making that researchers, policymakers, and practitioners may leverage in different contexts.

Results and discussion

Bibliometric assessment.

Figure  1 shows that multiple topics related to climate change adaptation and mitigation have been addressed in the context of higher education. This is evidenced by the diversity of terms in each of the four clusters which can be considered as research strands explored by the literature in the field. The output of the term co-occurrence analysis (Fig.  1 ) shows that multiple topics related to climate change adaptation and mitigation have been addressed in publications on climate change-related education and/or research activities/programs.

The red cluster describes aspects related to general policies aimed at reducing vulnerabilities and enhancing resilience and adaptive capacity, embracing terms related to biodiversity, food systems, and ecosystem services. Studies in this cluster usually discuss the relevance of governance in HEIs to ensure universities’ contribution towards reducing their impact, implementing adaptation strategies on climate change vulnerabilities, and fostering sustainable development 25 , 26 , 27 . This governance perspective is relevant since it could contribute to the universities’ process of ensuring that desired practices are initiated, implemented, and continued by the several stakeholders engaged in the process 28 . This perspective also implies the adaptation policies that aim to assist the universities in assembling their several systems, tackling the university’s campus operations, and helping society by producing research on the climate change field, especially related to themes such as ecology, food, and biodiversity. Ecology and biodiversity policies in the context of higher institutions are also discussed, especially in the context of green spaces, generating externalities in the perspective of ecological function and urban communities 29 and fostering the discussion of how to maintain biodiversity in a context of climate change adaptation since many species are constrained by changes in climate 30 , 31 . This cluster also presents studies on campus as ecosystems, exploring whether humans and the biosphere could be reconnected, enhancing the awareness of how to deal with the biodiversity loss related to climate change 32 .

The yellow cluster is focused on climate and environmental education and risk reduction. This cluster, in particular, focuses on the educational practices of universities and the extent to which they address climate change and environmental challenges 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 . More specifically, it deals with the knowledge and sustainability behaviour of students in the process of educating well-versed agents in climate change aspects and capable of conducting adaptation and mitigation strategies 37 , 38 . This cluster also reports on integrating disaster reduction for extreme events 39 , 40 , 41 , highlighting the significance of disaster risk education and environmental awareness programs to effectively address these challenges 42 .

Studies that belong to the blue cluster, in turn, are mainly focused on assessing the temperature, precipitation, and other aspects of climate change variability 43 , 44 , 45 . The relation this cluster has with HEIs is mainly focused on research practices, where research centres contribute to assessing climate change challenges by finding patterns and estimating indicators related, for example, to rainfall, temperature, and extreme events 46 , 47 . For example, Stefanidis and Alexandridis 48 studied the temporal variability, precipitation trends, and evapotranspiration in two forest regions in Greece. They discussed the drought scenarios and the implications for climate change adaptation. Similarly, Rawat and colleagues 49 analysed the rainfall variability and intensity of long-term monthly rainfall data using the Precipitation Concentration Index, which, according to the authors, could prepare governments for extreme weather events, which are imperative to adaptation to climate change conditions.

Finally, the green cluster is the second in a number of terms and has two main discussion streams. The first one is related to the climate change impact on water resources, land, and soil degradation, and inducing droughts 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 . The second perspective this cluster highlights is related to the precedents of climate change as well as the adaptation and mitigation strategies to address the challenges related to climate change. For example, there are reports on the potential of organic agricultural systems instead of crop productions using nitrogen-based fertilisers, since it leads to reduced N 2 O emissions 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , the importance of renewable energy production systems 60 , 61 as well as the industrial and human activities which can contribute to the emission of GHGs and environmental pollution 62 , impacting negatively human health 63 , 64 .

Research and development

Climate change research has been led since 1896 with Svante Arrhenius founding paper 65 . Since then, the volume of scientific literature on climate change has been increasing rapidly. The total number of articles on climate change exceeds 120 000 up to 2015 66 ; almost 90 000 papers were published between 1991 and 2011 67 . New fields of research have merged over time, often responding to society’s needs, such as attribution science, first documented in 2004 68 and included in the IPCC AR5 69 , the study of social health impacts of climate change, the incorporation of traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous perspectives, and generally speaking a growing emphasis on adaptation, including novel approaches like community-based adaptation 70 and participatory action-research 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 . Table  1 presents a set of elected case studies on research institutions.

At the same time, climate change research has become more interdisciplinary and transitioned from individual researchers to research centres, hosted by one or several institutions. It also more often than before involves stakeholders from society, leading to collaborative research initiatives. We illustrate this through examples for all three types of research centres in Canada: single-university—the Prairie Climate Centre, multi-university—the Réseau Inondations InterSectoriel du Québec (RIISQ), collaborative, and Ouranos. Two of the most influential research centers, both in numbers and impact of publications, are the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, which pioneered ground-breaking work on planetary boundaries, climate tipping points, and exploration of past and future climates in an interdisciplinary perspective 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 . It must be stressed that climate change research is not an exclusivity of European or North American universities. Institutions like the Munasinghe Institute for Development and the International Centre for Climate Change and Development are highly respected in the fields of adaptation or sustainability applied to climate change and incorporate issues, approaches, and values relevant to the Global South in their research. As we wish to demonstrate through the selected research projects below, there is a trend for the development of international, interdisciplinary cross-institution initiatives in climate change research, certainly also favoured by funding agency policies, especially in the research and development sector. Such projects can have a real impact on the ground; however, they need careful scientific and organisational planning in order to be truly successful 79 . Table  2 presents a set of elected case studies on research projects.

Teaching and learning

Equipping graduates with the necessary skills and capabilities required to succeed in both their personal and professional lives is a crucial goal for higher education institutions. In higher education institutions, there are varied interpretations of the cultural, social, economic, and environmental aspects of sustainable development. Simultaneously, teachers do not reach a consensus on how these different dimensions are interconnected 80 . Furthermore, there are diverse perspectives on how these matters should be approached within various degree programs and courses, and this can influence students' perceptions of values related to sustainability, ethics, and social responsibility 81 . However, understanding the complexity of climate change may be challenging for students and educators 82 . This could clarify why students' awareness of sustainability issues is not uniform or consistent 83 . However, it also underscores the potential intricacy associated with enhancing awareness of social, economic, and environmental issues among students 84 . From this viewpoint, students should acquire the skills not just to translate innovative ideas into tangible projects but also to effectively integrate environmental, social, and financial goals 85 .

In this regard, it is vital to increase their interest in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as prepare graduates to implement real-life solutions based on sustainability criteria 86 . Against this background, it is necessary not only to identify misconceptions and guarantee a proper understanding of climate change’s roots and consequences but also to help students become active and critical citizens capable of facilitating real change. In this context, the integration of SDGs in higher education requires the identification and clarification of educational objectives, as well as the adoption of innovative teaching and learning strategies suitable to transform education 87 .

Table  3 presents a set of selected case studies on teaching and learning. Several studies have addressed the issue of students’ perceptions and misconceptions regarding climate change. Some studies have used large samples to explore the drivers of pro-environmental behaviour 88 , but small-group, classroom-based, or program-based studies are also frequent approaches to explore the different ways how students understand climate change 89 , 90 , 91 . As mentioned below, defining, and clarifying the required capabilities and the necessary skills to accelerate the implementation of the SDGs in higher education is essential 92 . A growing number of studies have addressed this issue, using different strategies such as comprehensive approaches based on literature review techniques and the use of surveys 87 , as well as small-group studies relying on quantitative and qualitative techniques 93 . In addition to this, non-conventional, student-centered teaching and learning techniques are becoming increasingly popular in higher education due to their potential to help students acquire multiple learning outcomes 94 . Methodologies such as problem-based learning 95 , 96 , 97 , inquiry-based learning 98 , gamification 99 , 100 , or participatory case studies 101 , are examples of innovative strategies to promote education for sustainable development.

Governance, operations, and institutional practice

All around the world, universities are increasingly adopting carbon–neutral goals and practices 102 , 103 . This is reflected by the growing number of higher education providers that are aiming to become fully carbon–neutral institutions (through low-carbon operational practices) while at the same time innovating their curricula to better educate students (about the benefits of carbon neutrality) 1 , 12 , 104 . With this twin strategy, universities are decreasing their own “carbon footprint” (by lowering institution-linked greenhouse gasses) and increasing the wider community’s “carbon brain print” (by teaching about low-carbon living) 102 , 105 . The literature, therefore, categorises “governance” into matters about the immediate institutional governance and operational practices (of the universities themselves) and their secondary flow-on function of informing and influencing the governance and operational practices of other key stakeholders beyond their organisational confines (e.g., local communities, national governments, and the corporate sector) 106 . Table  3 shows a set of selected case studies addressing areas of governance, operations, and institutional practice. In terms of facilitating institution-wide carbon neutrality, universities are implementing a raft of strategies that may include private-private solar system partnerships 102 , renewables, electric vehicles, tree plantation and enhanced energy efficiency 107 , remote sensing, and campus tree surveys to maximise biosequestration and campus-based ecosystem services 108 , campus community gardening to enhance CSR and institutional sustainability practice 109 , in addition to a range of other priority actions that may achieve net zero carbon buildings and (Paris-aligned) carbon reduction targets 102 , 110 . Furthermore, many universities have announced institutional commitments to divest their endowments from fossil fuel holdings while recalibrating their operational practices in alignment with the UN SDGs 111 , 112 , 113 . These actions may have image-enhancing effects 114 . Pertinent performance metrics are captured by the Times Higher Education (THE) Impact Rankings, an annual process that assesses universities against the UN SDGs. In its most recent fourth edition, THE has ranked a total of 1406 universities from 106 countries/regions 115 . Finally, additional information on the strategies, operations, and budgetary plans of higher education institutions (HEIs) regarding their transition to net zero or carbon neutrality might not be found in academic publications but could be available in “grey literature” produced by the HEIs themselves, focusing on their performance and strategic vision. Table  4 includes a set of selected case studies on governance, operations, and institutional practice.

Civic engagement and community outreach

The crucial role that Universities must play is also reflected by the increasing efforts from higher education institutions to foster civic engagement and expand their community outreach. Universities play a vital role in fostering civic commitment and community outreach within their localities. By leveraging their resources, expertise, and diverse talent pool, universities can initiate impactful initiatives that address community needs and promote positive social change. One effective approach is to establish university-community partnerships, where faculty, students, and staff collaborate with local organizations and residents to identify pressing issues and co-create sustainable solutions. Additionally, universities can integrate service-learning programs into their curricula, encouraging students to actively engage with the community while applying their academic knowledge to real-world challenges. Offering workshops, seminars, and public events on relevant topics further encourages dialogue and knowledge-sharing between the institution and the community. By actively involving themselves in the community's fabric, universities can contribute to the betterment of society, nurture socially responsible citizens, and empower students to become agents of positive transformation.

In this context, cooperation among stakeholders led to the concept of “co-creation for sustainability”, which deals with relevant notions and innovative strategies for transformative research 116 , such as participatory action research (PAR) and other community-based research strategies, the creation of urban living labs, and the use of innovative strategies for civic cooperation such as student service learning 117 . Table  5 shows a set of selected successful case studies where cooperation between universities and local stakeholders proved to contribute to facilitating civic engagement/community outreach in their local communities. Against this background, PAR, a community-based technique in which beneficiaries take an active role in research 118 , could be used for multiple purposes to deal with the challenges generated by climate change, such as improving climate planning processes 119 , increase engagement of different stakeholders and identify the scope for developing the adaptive capability of local communities 120 , monitor environmental risks and damage 121 , or strengthening climate justice 122 . Other forms of transformative research rely on multidisciplinary teams formed by diverse stakeholders engaged in evaluating knowledge and providing technical advice 123 or fostering private–public partnerships to boost engineering solutions 124 , among other examples. In line with this multi-stakeholder cooperation, universities and other higher education institutions play a crucial role in creating ‘urban living labs’, understood as spaces where research is used for promoting innovation and collaboration to tackle social, economic, and environmental needs 125 , 126 , 127 . Finally, experiential learning strategies such as student service learning are becoming increasingly popular in higher education 128 , mainly because of their potential to foster critical thinking as well as promote social and civic engagement among students and enhance cooperation between different social actors 125 , 129 .

Conclusions

As this paper has outlined, universities can provide substantial contributions to both consumption and emissions globally. They also have the potential to play a key role in efforts to drive sustainability, both locally and globally.

As this paper has shown, many universities are switching to green operations that involve sustainability in campus activities such as water and energy consumption, waste production, and personal and institutional mobility, all of which have connections with climate change. Improvements may be pursued in respect of the implementation of activities such as smart waste management, sustainable transportation systems, and the more sustainable maintenance of existing buildings. Since daily campus operations result in the usage of large amounts of energy, it is important that higher education institutions that currently use fossil-fuel-based energy -which results in greater greenhouse gas releases- switch towards renewable energy use.

The production of waste also contributes greatly to global carbon emissions, and universities produce a significant amount of waste. Therefore, it is important to put in place appropriate strategies to manage waste and ideally prevent it, especially food waste since a large percentage of food wastage is generated at university canteens. There are ample examples of successfully-run recycling programmes, which may mobilise staff and students in a meaningful way. Some may not only reuse waste but also produce energy from it. Moreover, a further promising area is the use of cleaner transportation methods, as a tool to reduce the carbon footprint of higher education institutions. This may involve the use of campuswide shuttle services, carpooling, or the use of bicycles, by both staff and students. There is also much scope to reduce greenhouse emissions from travel. Whereas this is an essential part of universities´ operations -since both staff and students regularly use travel as part of their mobility and to attend conferences. Here, adequate solutions are also needed, for instance, the optimisation of trips and routes, and greater use of online facilities for those events whose physical attendance is not essential.

Higher education institutions can take several steps to address climate change. Such steps range from curriculum reform to creating new research initiatives and collaborations. Some of the recommendations that may further the cause of a greater engagement of universities on climate change include:

Curriculum Reform: as it is shown in Table  3 , there are few studies focusing on climate change aspects in curriculums, indicating a large opportunity for research. In this sense, higher education institutions should review their curricula to ensure that current and future generations of students are educated in the fundamentals of climate science (in technical subjects) and the global effects of climate change (in non-technical ones).

Education & Awareness: Aligned with the first recommendation, institutions should promote educational campaigns and public awareness initiatives to educate students and the public on the importance of reducing their carbon footprint. The case studies on civic engagement and community outreach shown in Table  5 evidence interesting examples of ways of implementing this kind of initiative for the public in general. As presented in the literature, the complexity and inter-transdisciplinary character of sustainability inhibits its understanding to some extent, but concrete examples of carbon footprint reduction can be an important approach to address this challenge.

Research: There are relevant challenges highlighted in the literature for inserting climate change in university programmes, evidencing the need for studies to deeply analyse these difficulties and propose manners for overcoming them. In addition, the existing research institutions, initiatives, and/or programs focusing on climate change-related aspects (Tables  1 and 4 ) can play a key role in enhancing the efforts in the field and institutions worldwide should encourage and fund research initiatives that seek to understand the causes and effects of climate change, develop solutions and technologies, and identify innovative strategies for addressing the climate crisis.

Collaboration: In the same line of reasoning of the previous recommendation, institutions should establish and enhance partnerships with local governments, non-profit organizations, and other stakeholders to collaborate on initiatives to mitigate climate change.

Renewable Energy: Another evidenced source of improvement opportunity regarding climate change is that institutions should invest in renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, and geothermal, to reduce their emissions and promote sustainability. They should, in other words, practice what they preach.

Green Buildings: Aligned with the previous recommendation, institutions should strive to create and maintain sustainable buildings, such as LEED-certified buildings, to reduce their environmental impact. In Table  4 , examples of case studies on governance, operations, and institutional practice are evidenced, which can be used as a starting point for further development.

This paper has some limitations. The first is related to the sample. The study analysed 1214 documents that only considered how climate change education and/or research is pursued by universities, without focusing on other parameters. Secondly, only 794 documents remained in the database and were used for term co-occurrence analysis in VOSviewer. In addition, the case studies focused on four areas, namely research and development, teaching and learning, governance and operations, and civic engagement and community outreach, and did not consider elements such as collaboration with external organisations. Finally, the authors used the main terms to create the search string, and because of the diversity of the field, it was not possible to track all the possible terms related to each one of the four dimensions. However, this last limitation could be an opportunity for future studies as new terms that are not commonly used till the date of this research might start to gain attention and start to be adopted. Despite these limitations, the paper provides a welcome addition to the literature since it documents and promotes the current emphasis given by universities to climate change.

As to future trends on climate change and universities, there is a perceived need for greater engagement. Universities are important hubs of innovation and knowledge creation, with a comprehensive body of information and experience, which can significantly help to address the challenges of climate change, and across several subjects and contexts. As such, more universities are expected to intensify their efforts in research, education, and outreach activities related to climate change.

Moreover, universities should become more involved in the public policy and advocacy sphere, advocating for solutions to climate change and engaging in climate-related projects. This involvement is expected to increase as universities become more involved in the global climate change discourse.

Data availability

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].

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This study is part of the “100 papers to accelerate the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals” initiative.

This work was funded by Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, TÉLUQ University.

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W.L.F. conceived the study. W.L.F., S.W., J.L., J.S., I.S.R., A.S., R.A., J.H.P.P.E., M.K wrote the main manuscript. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Leal Filho, W., Weissenberger, S., Luetz, J.M. et al. Towards a greater engagement of universities in addressing climate change challenges. Sci Rep 13 , 19030 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-45866-x

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Climate Resilience Institute

Enrollment Closed

There has never been a more pressing time to study the intersection of environmental change and social equity to learn how you can make a difference! Students will apply an interdisciplinary case-study approach to the social, ecological, and political facets of contemporary environmental issues; learn the principles and key concepts of environmental change and resilience from experts in many fields; and gain hands-on knowledge of techniques for environmental data collection, analysis and visualization. Topics span from resilient water infrastructure to climate activism and environmental justice. Students will actively participate in community responses to climate change through a series of socio-environmental field trips with Boston-area organizations. Working in small teams, students will identify a socio-environmental research question, gather and analyze data on the subject, and synthesize their findings into a college-level capstone project. The Climate Resilience Institute is hosted by the Tufts Environmental Studies Program.

Program at a Glance

Program dates Jul 21 – Aug 2, 2024 

Eligible students Entering grades 10-12 or a Spring 2024 high school graduate

Location Tufts University Medford / Somerville Campus Location details

Housing Tufts dormitory with AC (or commute if local)

Application dates Dec 1, 2023 - May 1, 2024

Application info

• Academic transcript and history
• 1 letter of recommendation
• Parent permission
• Statement of Interest

Credit Credit is available, the program is graded on a pass/fail basis and credit offered is pre-matriculation credit. Credi t not offered for international students 

Financial aid Limited need-based scholarships available

Program fee

• Commuter: $4,000
• Residential: $5,500

Disclaimer: This program is not related to Tufts University Undergraduate Admissions. Participation in this program does not result in admission to a Tufts University degree program. Tufts reserves the right to admit as requested, to deny admission, or to offer provisional admission. The program will not provide feedback to applicants if admission is denied.

Hear from Students

Meet Your Program Staff

Sara Gomez, Program Associate Director

Sara is the Associate Director of the Environmental Studies Program. She works with students, faculty, staff and community partners to design and implement curricular and non-academic initiatives. She is passionate about food systems and to that end, she teaches a Tufts summer class on Sustainable Agriculture, speared-headed the creation of the Tufts Food Rescue Collaborative and established the annual Tufts Food Systems Symposium. If you are interested in studying Environmental Studies at Tufts, she’s always happy to meet with prospective students and their families. She has a BS in Environmental Science from the University of Cordoba (Spain) and a PhD in Plant Sciences from the Radboud University (The Netherlands).

Colin Orians, Program Director

Colin is the Director of the Environmental Studies Program and a Full Professor in the Biology department. He is the co-founded the Climate Resilience Institute in 2020 along with his former graduate student Gabriela Garcia. He is interested in Global Change Biology, with particular emphasis on climate change, species invasion, and sustainability of natural and agricultural ecosystems. His research group works in diverse agroecosystems – tea in China, coffee in Costa Rica, and vegetables and grains in Massachusetts – as well as in old fields, hemlock forests and urban green roofs. Some projects they are working on include the effects of climate change and herbivores on tea chemistry, and how it affects tea quality and productivity (as well as farmer livelihoods!). He received a BA in Biology from Earlham College and a PhD in Entomology from Pennsylvania State University.

Kylea Garces, Program Instructor

Dr. Kylea Garces is the program instructor for the pre-college Climate Resilience institute at Tufts University! She received her BS in Environmental Sciences at the University of Oregon and her PhD in Biology at the University of Louisville. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow within Northeastern University’s Marine and Environmental Science Department. She is a trained community ecologist and excited by all things fungi! Broadly, her research has focused on plant-fungal interactions in coastal ecosystems with study sites spanning the sand dunes of Lake Michigan as well as New England coastal marshes. Specifically, Kylea is interested in the ways fungi may be able to promote plant resilience in response to multiple stressors induced by global change. In her free time, you can often find Kylea at a basketball game cheering on her favorite team or hanging out at the beach. 

Sinet Kroch, Program Lead

Sinet Kroch is the new Program Coordinator for Environmental Studies. She is a first-generation college student from Bucknell University, where she received a BA in Environmental Studies and Women's Studies. Before joining Tufts University, she worked as a climate adaptation resident with the Nature Conservancy, Maine chapter, and the Maine Environmental Education Association (MEEA), where she collaborated with local communities to integrate nature climate solutions in their adaptation/resilient projects. Sinet will be the Program Lead for the Climate Resilience Institute, and she cannot wait to work with the CRI students this Summer. 

Sinet was born and raised in Siem Reap, Cambodia. She loves cooking, hiking, gardening, and binge-watching Asian dramas. She is very excited to work for Tufts! 

Program Details

• Excellent interdisciplinary academic experience at a leading research university
• 1 Tufts Credit (P/F)*
• A more sophisticated understanding of how interacting ecological, social and political systems can hinder or promote climate resilience.
• Enhanced data analysis, visualization, and communication skills. 
• Learn about diverse pathways for an academic or professional career in the environmental arena.

*Student must Pass to earn credit; credit is pre-matriculation credit

Orientation

All program orientations will begin on the Monday of the program start. During this required orientation, we will review the overall program schedule, discuss policies and safety, and answer questions. Staff will be on-hand to address any issues.   Check in for residential students is on Sunday preceding program start - see ‘Residential Student’ dropdown for more information.

Program Topic Breakdown

• Climate refugees
• Differential impacts 
• Climate change litigation 
• Diversified farm landscapes: Barriers and opportunities. Lessons from the past. Innovating for the future. 
• Food sovereignty: Agroecology movement. Resilience for whom? 
• GMO debate: Adding nuance
• Consumer power: The role of culture in embracing cultured meats and insect proteins
• Sustaining pollinator communities
• Sea level rise: from science to planning
• Island nations and continental coasts
• Wetland ecosystem services
• Infrastructure and technology
• Coupling mitigation and adaptation
• “The Green Collar Economy” - Van Jones 
• Bioengineering
• Climate policy and negotiations (local and global)
• Engaging scientists in policy 
• Science journalism
• Youth education and engagement 
• The psychology of effective communication
• Spatial analyses
• Climate projections 
• Interdisciplinary research and synthesis 
• Environmental communication and data visualization

Closing Ceremony

On the last day of the program, students will participate in a closing ceremony that will give them the chance to share their finished work products and program experience. Family and friends will be invited to join to celebrate the students' accomplishments!  The Ceremony will occur on the last day of the program, and will conclude by 2pm. Exact details and invitations will be forthcoming.

Please note: The below represents a sample schedule based on our best expectations for the in-person iteration of this program. The schedule is subject to change as we continue to develop the program to be as meaningful as possible for our students. 

Application & Policies

Program eligibility.

General Requirements

• Entering high school grades 10-12 *or* a Spring 2024 high school graduate
• Students will need a laptop to participate in the program.

Residential Students

Students electing to live in the dorms or to attend a residential program must be at least 15 at the start of the program and no older than 19 before the program end date.

International Students

Both domestic and international students are welcome to apply to and attend our pre-college programs, although please note we cannot sponsor visas for this program.

Non-Native English Speakers

If you indicate that English is not your primary language, you will be asked to submit evidence of English Language proficiency. Please see our " How to Apply " page for details.

Application Requirements

Step 1: Complete an Online Application

The online application will ask you for the following information:

• Basic personal information, including parents/guardians and emergency contact (if you are under 18, we will contact a parent for permission to enroll)
• Program preferences (e.g., whether you would like to be a residential or commuter student)
• Contact information for 1 individual to submit a Letter of Recommendation - this individual can be a teacher, counselor, or mentor. We will contact this individual on your behalf.
• Test scores - optional, unless you must submit scores as evidence of English proficiency
• Warrants and signatures

If you need to log back into this application after starting, click here: return to my application .

Step 2: Upload Your High School Transcript During your application process, you will be asked to provide us with contact information for an official from your high school. They will receive an email with further instructions to upload your transcript.

Step 3: Parental Consent and Letter of Recommendation

As a part of your application, you will be asked to provide contact information for both a parent/guardian and a recommender. Once you submit your application, our systems will automatically email the parent/guardian and recommender you listed in the application with instructions for how to fill out the online permission or recommendation form.

Please note your application will not be considered submitted and review of your application will not begin until the materials from Step 2 and Step 3 have been received by Tufts Pre-College Programs.

Pre-College Admissions Decision

Once an applicant has submitted an application and all required admissions documents are received, the applicant will be considered for admission by the Tufts Pre-College Programs review committee for the specific program(s) to which they applied.

Decisions are made on a rolling basis and students will typically receive an official email informing them of their admissions status within 10 business days of Tufts receiving all required materials.

If you do not receive your email within two weeks of all materials being submitted, please contact us at [email protected] or 617-627-2926.

Post-Enrollment Materials

Admitted students must do the following prior to the start of the program:

• $550 deposit must be received within 10 days of admission until the payment deadline (May 15) or until the program fills, at which time enrollment is secured only by full tuition payment
• Complete all enrollment forms and/or follow-up requests prior to the stated deadline

Should the above not be completed prior to the stated deadlines, the student will be automatically withdrawn from the program.

Program Fees - Summer 2024

Key financial policies.

Refund Policies

Billing & Payment Policies

All Policies

Commuter Program Fee:  $4,000

• Includes:  all program activities, materials and supplies, 1 meal per weekday (lunch), opening/closing events, use of select campus facilities, included program excursions and daily activities.
• Excludes:  residential accommodations, breakfast/dinner/weekend meals, airfare/transportation to and from home city or residence, courses and activities shown to have an extra fee, laundry, spending money, souvenirs, meals eaten away from program, trip cancellation insurance, medical insurance, required vaccinations, medical and dental expenses, any non-program-related transportation needs, and anything not explicitly stated above.

Residential Program Fee: $5,500

• Includes:  all program activities, materials and supplies, bed in a double-room in a Tufts dormitory, 3 meals per day (brunch / dinner on Sundays), use of select campus facilities, included program and residential excursions and daily activities, bed linens, pillow and towels, 24-hour residential care and support, staff-accompanied airport transfer during specified windows.
• Excludes:  airfare/transportation to and from home city, courses and activities shown to have an extra fee, laundry, spending money, souvenirs, meals eaten away from program, airport transfers outside of specified windows, trip cancellation insurance, medical insurance, required vaccinations, medical and dental expenses, any non-program-related transportation needs, and anything not explicitly stated above.

Health Fees - TBA

Health Insurance:  TBD, only if evidence of valid U.S.-based health insurance for the entire duration of the program is not presented  (Summer 2023: $63.75)

• Coverage Dates: TBD
• Students carrying sufficient, U.S.-based health insurance valid for the entire duration of the program  do not need to pay this fee
• All high school students enrolled in Tufts Pre-College Programs must carry valid U.S.-based health insurance valid for the entire duration of the program
• Students will be asked to provide evidence of sufficient insurance during the enrollment process. If your student has sufficient insurance, no further action will be necessary
• Those who do not have sufficient insurance, and are an international student, will be automatically enrolled in and billed for a qualifying plan for the duration of the program. If evidence of qualifying insurance in presented by June 15, we will reverse the insurance enrollment and charges

Vaccinations:  TBD, only if evidence of required vaccinations is not presented  (Summer 2023: $50-$180 per vaccine)

• Students who can demonstrate that all required vaccinations were received prior to the program start date  do not need to pay these fees
• All high school students enrolled in Tufts Pre-College Programs must show evidence of required vaccinations during the enrollment process. If your student has all required vaccinations, no further action will be necessary
• Those who do not have all required vaccinations will be asked to provide further documentation or will be required to receive the vaccination, with parental consent, while on campus. If a student receives the vaccination while on campus the student will be responsible for the associated fee and grades / transcripts will be with-held for non-payment. If a student does not provide appropriate documentation or agree to receive the vaccination while on campus, Tufts reserves the right to remove the student from the program

Availability of Awards

Tufts Pre-College Programs are committed to aiding students from all backgrounds. Although we have only limited need-based financial aid available, we do our best to distribute the funds to students for whom it can make the greatest difference in their ability to attend.

Financial Aid awards are made on a rolling basis to students with demonstrated need. We aim to provide enough aid to eligible students so that they are able to successfully enroll and participate in the program. Seasonal aid awards are as follows:

• Fall: We currently do not offer aid for the Fall term
• Spring: We currently do not offer aid for the Spring term
• Summer: We will typically distribute awards monthly beginning in February and will continue until the enrollment deadline or until aid is fully distributed.

If financial assistance is essential to your ability to attend the program, we recommend that you wait to pay the $550 non-refundable deposit until you have received your financial aid decision. Award decisions will be issued twice per month.

Students with undocumented status are considered for financial aid like any other U.S. citizen or permanent resident. If you are undocumented or have DACA status and want more information about how to apply for financial aid, please call our office at 617-627-2926.

Please note:

• International students are not eligible for financial aid at this time. Families should expect to contribute to the remaining portion of the program cost as well as other expenses like travel, books, etc.
• We currently do not offer aid for students participating in our Leadership for Social Change Intensive.
• Complete the Admissions Application for the pre-college program you would like to attend.
• During the application process, you will be asked to indicate whether you are interested in being considered for financial aid.
• After submission, you will have the option of completing a financial aid application in your student portal .
• We will review your financial aid application. Your financial aid application will be considered for the next monthly aid award(s). Award decisions will be issued twice per month.
• You will be notified by email of the amount of the award.
• You will have 10 days (including weekends and holidays) to accept the award by completing your Financial Aid Award Form and submitting your deposit. If you have received a full financial aid scholarship you are not required to pay your deposit, as it is covered by your scholarship.
• Tufts Pre-College Programs will then credit your student account with the amount of financial aid you received.
• Please note: Your enrollment in the program is still contingent on payment of any remaining balance after the award is applied to your account, and on receiving your enrollment forms.
• If you do not receive an award you will be notified via email.

Please see the Policies section of this website for a complete list of applicable policies.

Life at Tufts

Whether you commute to our program, live with us on-campus, or participate virtually, we strive to make each moment of the student experience at Tufts memorable. From our dorms to our dining halls, and our athletic facilities to our check-in and orientation, all aspects of our programming are designed to inform and enable students to have a healthy, fulfilling, and safe summer.

Just five miles northwest of Boston, Tufts University’s Medford/Somerville tranquil campus sits on a hill overlooking the city. Our location offers a relaxed and safe campus environment with easy access to Boston.

Guidelines & Access

Safety & campus access for high school pre-college programs.

University Facilities

Students will have full access to the university’s facilities including the libraries, computer lab, and Student Center. Students will also have full access to Tufts’ Steve Tisch Sports and Fitness Center, featuring racquet courts, a swimming pool, and cardio and weight-training equipment.

In addition, SMFA Studio Art Intensive students will have access to supervised studios and resources, including the W.Van Alan Clark Library, the media stockroom (where you can borrow any equipment necessary for your art), the School Store, and the computer lab. See more details about our studios .

Health & Wellness

Tufts works hard to ensure the health and well-being of all of its students. Once accepted to the program, Tufts will ask all students to submit information related to their health and will collect details regarding allergies and accessibility concerns. Tufts and Residential Life staff will work together to ensure students’ routine medical needs are met.

Tufts also has procedures in place for students with urgent or emergency needs, illnesses, or injuries. Our procedures combine on-campus and hospital-based care depending on the nature and severity of the issue. A student’s emergency contact will be notified, if one is provided, in the event of an issue.

In any type of health & wellness emergency, students should immediately contact Tufts University Police at (617) 627-6911.

Please note: Medical fees of any kind will be billed to the student and are not included in program fees.

Campus Security

Tufts University is considered very safe among U.S. college campuses. Although crime on campus is unusual, we do have an open campus in a major metropolitan area, and we expect our students to exercise good judgment and responsibility as they navigate the campus. Tufts University maintains its own police department, on the job 24 hours a day, if an emergency arises. Each location is equipped with an emergency blue light phone system, and residence halls require a current and valid Tufts ID card for entry and a mechanical key for access to bedrooms. Emergency processes and protocols will be reviewed during orientation.

For more information, please visit our Campus Safety page.

To ensure the safety of our Pre-College students, we are closely monitoring the ongoing COVID-19 public health crisis, and following local, state, and federal guidance as it pertains to our Pre-College programming.

Please visit  Tufts' COVID-19 page for specific information regarding Pre-College COVID-19 policies and procedures.

Tufts University is not only a leading institution of higher education and academic research, but it is leading the nation in terms of higher education's response to our public health crisis .

For more information about Tufts' response and action planning regarding COVID-19: Please visit Tufts University's COVID-19 information .

Tufts takes the safety of its students seriously. All programs are staffed with resources appropriate to care for the size and nature of the program. Tufts makes reasonable efforts to secure background checks and provide Title IX training to every staff person responsible for students in its Pre-College Programs.

Students are required to attend all elements of the program schedule, and any expected absences must be communicated to program staff in advance. Tufts takes the safety of its students very seriously. As such, our current policy for Pre-College students states that students cannot be in a lab or leave campus during their program without the supervision of a staff member or explicit parental permission received through official processes.

Some elements of our supervision plan vary depending on how the student is interacting with our campus. Below is a brief overview of where to find information about this. Please note that not all programs offer residential/commuter/virtual options, but the below applies when they do:

• Residential Students: Safety in the dorms is also paramount. Please see the Residential Students section below for more information about how our Residential Life program is staffed.
• Commuter Students: The commute to campus and time outside of the program will not be monitored by program staff, although the Tufts University Police Department and other safety protocols (in which students will be trained) are available to Tufts community members at all times. Detailed information about traveling to each of our campuses, including details on parking, can be found here . Please check the course list if you do not know the campus on which your course meets. Please note: Commuter students are not permitted to enter any residence halls on campus.
• Virtual Students: Students are required to attend all elements of the program schedule, and any expected absences must be communicated to program staff in advance. Tufts takes the safety of its students very seriously, even in the virtual environment. Students who enroll will receive more information about our virtual safety protocols.

Pre-College Program Residential Students

Check-in will begin at 9 am on the first Sunday of the program (or Monday, 7/1, for Tufts College Experience & Tufts Summer Research Experience). Students are welcome to arrive on campus and check in on Sunday between 9 am and 5 pm, and between the hours of 12 pm and 3 pm if arriving by car. During check-in, room assignments will be distributed and students will have the opportunity to meet their Residential Coordinator (RC) and roommates and unpack.

For students arriving from out of town on their program's arrival day between 9 am and 5 pm, there is a shuttle service from the airport and train/bus station for students arriving from out of state. All details about arrival and departure travel will be communicated after you have been admitted to the program.

Students arriving outside of the specified window should be in touch with us to discuss what accommodations can be arranged. While we make reasonable efforts to accommodate students who need to arrive early or depart late, we cannot guarantee the same services will be available to students arriving or departing outside of the specified windows.

Residential Life

Residential students will get the full Tufts University experience by living on-campus in one of Tufts' undergraduate dorms! Rooms are air-conditioned with 24/7 security and hospitality; accessible rooms may be available upon request.

Bedrooms will be doubles in a common hall. Halls are divided by gender and age, and students are grouped into smaller communities known as Resident Advisor groups. Roommates and RA groups are determined based on the pre-program housing questionnaire, taking into account age and geographic diversity. Full bedding and towels will be provided and replaced weekly. Wi-Fi is available throughout campus.

Resident Coordinators (RCs) will live in each hall and work to create a strong, supportive residential community. A Resident Coordinator's role is to support students in every aspect of their summer experience while serving as a mentor and active leader.

The residence hall is secured at all times, and students are required to use a current, valid Tufts ID card for entry into the building. Each individual dormitory room is secured with either a mechanical or digital lock.

A dedicated residential staff oversees student safety during the entirety of the program. Students are honor-bound to follow clear safety protocols, whether on campus or in the city, and are required to use the buddy system during free time. Tufts takes the safety of its students seriously. All programs are staffed with resources appropriate to care for the size and nature of the program. Tufts makes reasonable efforts to secure background checks and provide Title IX training to every staff person responsible for students in its Pre-College Programs.

See our policy section for additional information, and please do not hesitate to contact us with questions and concerns.

Residential Staff

Residential staff will support students as they adjust to living in a dormitory and being responsible members of a summer program community. The residence staff will include a director, senior staff, and one resident advisor for every ten students. Prior to the program, residence staff will be trained to lead student groups, manage student conflict and resolution, and oversee all safety aspects of the program. They will begin the program well-prepared to meet the needs of all Tufts Pre-College Program students.

Residential program fees include three meals per day and brunch/dinner on Sundays. All meals on the Medford/Somerville campus will be at Dewick-MacPhie Dining Center, conveniently located a few minutes from student housing. Dewick-MacPhie provides a wide variety of menu choices, including vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and an organic salad bar. All meals on the Boston Fine Arts (SMFA), Boston Health Sciences, or Grafton campuses will be provided through boxed lunches or by Tufts staff. Tufts staff will also provide meals for program-related activities taking place off-campus. Tufts Dining is able to accommodate most dietary restrictions and preferences. Please advise us of dietary needs during the application process.

Activities & Trips

We want your summer to be fun too! It is summer after all! Residential Life staff will be planning trips and activities throughout the summer that will allow students to make friends, build relationships, and relax from the world-class academic work they will be doing in the classroom.

Daily Activities

Daily activities might include ice cream socials, midnight pancakes, trips to local coffee houses for poetry readings, lectures around campus, visits to Davis Square, etc. The cost of most of these activities will be included, however, incidentals like coffee at the coffee house or public transportation fares for an optional activity will not be covered by the program.

Many programs are also planning their own program-specific activities, often thematically relevant to the program content itself. Look out for these activities in the program description above and in the information provided after you enroll!

Examples of past weekend trips include excursions to Six Flags New England, Crane Beach in Ipswich, Downtown Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Duck Boat tours, Charles River Cruises, and more! Please note that weekend trips vary from year to year and these are only examples of the kinds of trips this program might include. The cost of any such excursions (including transportation, entrance fees, regularly scheduled meals, and supervision) is included in the cost of the program, although souvenirs, extra food, and other incidentals are not.

High School Summer Program for Commuter Students

Commuting to the Program

We know that for some students, living on campus is not the best option. We welcome you to our program! For commuter students, the program will begin at 9:00am on the first Monday of the program with an orientation and end at 2:00pm on the last Friday of the program with a closing event. Saturdays and Sundays are not program days and commuter students are not expected on campus on these days.

Medford/ Somerville: For more information on commuting to the Medford Campus click here .

SMFA:  During each day of the program, commuter students should arrive on the Fenway (SMFA) campus at 9:30am, and proceed directly to their program's location. Students must depart from campus at 4:30pm. Students remaining on campus past 4:45pm, arriving before 9:15am, or on non-program days will not be under the care of program staff (parents accept responsibility). Detailed information about traveling to the Fenway (SMFA) campus, including details on parking and public transportation, can be found here . Alternatively, commuter students may opt to take the bus with residential SMFA Studio Art participants travelling between Tufts Medford/Somerville campus and the SMFA Fenway campus. Commuter students opting for this option must arrive at the Somerville/Medford campus by 8:45am and be picked up at the Somerville/Medford campus at 5:15pm. No alternative transportation will be provided for students who arrive to campus after the bus departs. Specific meeting location and updated times (as needed) to be provided closer to program start.

AVM: During each day of the program, commuter students should arrive on the Grafton campus at 9:00am, and proceed directly to their program's location. Adventures in Veterinary Medicine students have the option to meet at Medford and take the bus to the Grafton campus, or meet at the Grafton campus. Students must depart from campus by 6:00pm at the latest, though students may leave at the end of their afternoon sessions at 5:00pm on most days. Students remaining on campus past 6:00pm, arriving before 8:45am, or on non-program days will not be under the care of program staff (parents accept responsibility)

Commuter students and their parents are responsible for ensuring their student travels to and from campus safely and on time each day. Detailed information about traveling to the Medford / Somerville campus and the Grafton campus, including details on parking, can be found here .

Please note: commuter students are not permitted to enter any residence halls on campus. Breakfast / dinner are not provided for commuter students.

Students can purchase breakfast or dinner onsite at the Medford / Somerville campus with credit card, debit card, cash, or JumboCash. All meals on the Medford/Somerville campus will be at Dewick-MacPhie Dining Center, conveniently located a few minutes from student housing. Dewick-MacPhie provides a wide variety of menu choices, including vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and an organic salad bar. All meals on the Fenway (SMFA), Boston Health Sciences, or Grafton campuses will be provided through boxed lunches or by Tufts staff. Tufts staff will also provide meals for program related activities taking place off-campus. Tufts dining is able to accommodate most dietary restrictions and preferences. Please advise us of dietary needs during the application process.

2021 Pre-College Student

I loved how we were able to touch on so many aspects of Climate Resilience. I also really enjoyed the guest speakers.

I loved how we covered so many topics (all related to climate change). It really was an engaging course that brought many aspects of climate resilience to mind through various guest speakers.

I love everything about this program I like how varied it was and all the different topics that were presented. I like how it included everyone from all different parts of the country and even the world!

I loved the variety in the guest speakers and getting to learn about the fight against climate change through a variety of disciplines

Similar programs you may be interested in...

Leadership for Social Change

International Relations

Adventures in Veterinary Medicine

Engineering Investigations

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Graduating seniors seek degrees in climate change and more US universities deliver

Climate Data Analyst Casey Olson, left, of Utah State University, conducts a tour during a visit to the Utah Climate Center’s climate reference station on April 1, 2024, in Logan, Utah. Increasingly, U.S. universities are creating climate change programs to meet demand from students who want to apply their firsthand experience to what they do after high school. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Lydia Conger, from left, all of Utah State University, Casey Olson, climate data analyst, Ashley Lewis and Maya Cottam stand with Kaitlyn Linford, high school student and her mother, Cherisse Linford, while being shown a wind-shielded precipitation gauge during a tour on April 1, 2024, in Logan, Utah. Increasingly, U.S. universities are creating climate change programs to meet demand from students who want to apply their firsthand experience to what they do after high school. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Climate Data Analyst Casey Olson, center left, of Utah State University stands with students during a tour of the climate reference station on April 1, 2024, in Logan, Utah. Increasingly, U.S. universities are creating climate change programs to meet demand from students who want to apply their firsthand experience to what they do after high school. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

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At 16, Katya Kondragunta has already lived through two disasters amped by climate change. First came wildfires in California in 2020 . Ash and smoke forced her family to stay inside their home in the Bay Area city of Fremont, for weeks.

Then they moved to Prosper, Texas, where she dealt with record-setting heat last summer .

“We’ve had horrible heat waves and they’ve impacted my everyday life,” the high school junior said. “I’m in cross country ... I’m supposed to go outside and run every single day to get my mileage in.”

Kondragunta says in school she hasn’t learned about how climate change is intensifying these events, and she hopes that will change when she gets to college.

Increasingly, U.S. colleges are creating climate change programs to meet demand from students who want to apply their firsthand experience to what they do after high school, and help find solutions.

“Lots of centers and departments have renamed themselves or been created around these climate issues, in part because they think it will attract students and faculty,” said Kathy Jacobs, director of the University of Arizona Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions. It launched a decade ago and connects several climate programs at the school in Tucson.

Lydia Conger, from left, all of Utah State University, Casey Olson, climate data analyst, Ashley Lewis and Maya Cottam stand with Kaitlyn Linford, high school student and her mother, Cherisse Linford, while being shown a wind-shielded precipitation gauge during a tour on April 1, 2024, in Logan, Utah. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Other early movers that created programs, majors, minors and certificates dedicated to climate change include the University of Washington , Yale University , Utah State University , the University of Montana, Northern Vermont University and the University of California, Los Angeles . Columbia, the private university in New York City, opened its Climate School in 2020 with a graduate degree in climate and society, and has related undergraduate programs in the works.

Just in the past 4 years, the public Plymouth State University in New Hampshire , Iowa State , Nashville private university Vanderbilt , Stanford University , the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others have started climate-related studies. Hampton University, a private, historically Black university in Virginia, is building one now , and the University of Texas at Austin will offer theirs this fall .

The fact that climate change is affecting more people is one factor. The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act , the largest climate investment in U.S. history, plus growth in climate-focused jobs, are also increasing interest, experts say.

In these programs, students learn how the atmosphere is changing as a result of burning coal, oil and gas, along with the way crops will shift with the warming planet and the role of renewable energy in cutting use of fossil fuels.

They dive into how to communicate about climate with the public, ethical and environmental justice aspects of climate solutions and the roles lawmakers and businesses play in cutting greenhouse gases.

Students also cover disaster response and ways communities can prepare and adapt before climate change worsens. The offerings require biology, chemistry, physics, and social sciences faculty, among others.

Climate Data Analyst Casey Olson, center left, of Utah State University stands with students during a tour of the climate reference station on April 1, 2024, in Logan, Utah. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

“It’s not just ‘oh, yeah, climate, global warming, environmental stuff,’” said Lydia Conger, a senior who enrolled at Utah State specifically for its climate science studies.

“It has these interesting technical parts in math and physics, but then also has this element of geology,” she said, “and oceanography and ecology.”

When higher ed institutions put their programs together, they often draw on existing meteorology and atmospheric sciences studies. Some house climate under sustainability or environmental science departments. But climate tracks need to go beyond those to satisfy some incoming students.

In Kennebunk, Maine, high school junior Will Eagleson has lived through storms that caused coastal destruction. The sea level is rising in his hometown. As the 17-year-old considers college, he said to get his attention, schools must “narrow it down from environmental and Earth science as a whole, to more climate change-focused programs.”

For Lucia Everist, a senior at Edina High School in Minnesota who is frustrated at her own lack of climate education so far, schools need to go deeper on the human impact of climate change. She cited disproportionate impact on Black, Latino, Indigenous and low-income neighborhoods.

“I looked a lot into the curriculum itself,” the 18-year-old said of her college search. Everywhere she applied, “I made sure had the social aspect just as much as the science aspect.”

Climate students need to learn everything from healthcare to how to store clean solar and wind energy, said Megan Latshaw, who runs Johns Hopkins University’s master’s programs in its Environmental Health and Engineering department. The school has a graduate degree in energy policy and climate, and also offers two certificates that include the term climate change.

“It’s the flooding. It’s the heat waves. It’s the wildfires. It’s the air pollution that’s generated when we’re burning fossil fuels. It’s allergies. It’s water scarcity, and people who may have to flee where they’ve lived for their entire life,” Latshaw said. She noted the university looks into weaving climate change into its schools of public health, engineering, education, medicine, nursing and more.

Another factor may be that many colleges around the country face declining enrollment and less public funding, pushing them to market new degrees to stay relevant.

Many small, private colleges have had to shut down over the last decade with fewer students graduating from high school and more opting for career-oriented training . The same pressures are affecting large public universities systems, which have cut academic programs and faculty to close gaps in budgets.

“There is definitely some part of academia that just simply responds to consumer demand,” said John Knox, undergraduate coordinator for the University of Georgia’s Atmospheric Sciences program, who is considering whether the school should offer a climate certificate. “In the end, I’m worried more about our students succeeding than marketing something to somebody.”

This story has been corrected to reflect that Vanderbilt University is not an Ivy League school.

Associated Press news editor Michael Melia in Connecticut contributed to this story.

Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate solutions reporter. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @alexa_stjohn . Reach her at [email protected] .

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Climate Change, Environment, and Health: The implementation and initial evaluation of a longitudinal, integrated curricular theme and novel competency framework at Harvard Medical School

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – review & editing

¶ ‡ MCK and JRM contributed equally and are co-first authors.

Affiliations Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

Affiliations Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, Department of Emergency Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital/Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

Affiliation Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Project administration, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Project administration, Writing – review & editing

Roles Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Supervision, Validation, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – original draft

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, Department of Medicine, Cambridge Health Alliance, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America

• Madeleine C. Kline, 
• Julia R. Malits, 
• Natalie Baker, 
• Hugh Shirley, 
• Ben Grobman, 
• William Éamon Callison, 
• Stephen Pelletier, 
• Kari Nadeau, 
• David S. Jones, 
• Gaurab Basu

• Published: May 29, 2024
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000412
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

Climate change, air pollution, and ecological degradation impact health through numerous, complex mechanisms. To train future physicians to understand these impacts, medical schools can deliver longitudinal climate curricula in undergraduate medical education, but the field remains nascent. This report describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of the longitudinal, integrated Climate Change, Environment, and Health curricular theme and novel competency framework at Harvard Medical School (HMS). A group of HMS students collaborated with faculty to integrate climate content into the pre-clerkship curriculum. The team subsequently pursued institutional recognition as a formal HMS curricular theme and created a new competency framework that guided curriculum integration mapping and evaluation tool development. The competencies cover the impact of climate change, air pollution, and ecological degradation on health in the context of historical and structural inequities and explore the role of healthcare in contributing to both climate change and solutions. A retrospective, eight-item survey using a seven-point Likert scale and two open-ended questions was administered at the end of the pre-clerkship curriculum. HMS approved a required, four-year Climate Change, Environment, and Health curricular theme in January 2023. Survey data from 100/134 (74.6%) study participants showed that most students agreed (somewhat agree/agree/strongly agree) the curricular theme was valuable (76.0%) and improved their understanding of the health impacts of climate change (80.0%). Most students agreed that their abilities in the five competencies improved because of exposure to the curricular theme. Qualitative comments indicated that students found the curriculum valuable, and also provided constructive feedback. Efforts to expand the curriculum to all four years of medical school and conduct further evaluation continue. Further scholarship is needed to present different curricular approaches and competency frameworks, which can ultimately support effective training of future physicians to understand and respond to the impacts of climate change on health and health equity.

Citation: Kline MC, Malits JR, Baker N, Shirley H, Grobman B, Callison WÉ, et al. (2024) Climate Change, Environment, and Health: The implementation and initial evaluation of a longitudinal, integrated curricular theme and novel competency framework at Harvard Medical School. PLOS Clim 3(5): e0000412. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000412

Editor: Sherilee L. Harper, University of Alberta, CANADA

Received: November 27, 2023; Accepted: April 8, 2024; Published: May 29, 2024

Copyright: © 2024 Kline et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: We have the raw data available in the submission and submitted as a supporting file .

Funding: MK was supported by award number T32GM144273 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences or the National Institutes of Health. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Climate change is a present and escalating public health crisis. The World Health Organization (WHO) has described climate change as the single greatest health threat facing humanity [ 1 ]. The combined effects of climate change, air pollution, and ecological degradation have devastating consequences on human health, including severe weather events, extreme heat, poor air and water quality, altered crop yields and reduced food security, changes in vector ecology, and social conflict [ 2 ]. Critically, climate change, air pollution, and ecological degradation are issues of health equity that intersect with systemic forces such as structural racism, income inequality, and environmental injustice to exacerbate existing health inequities. For example, communities historically impacted by redlining experience greater health risks associated with increased exposure to oil and gas wells, higher levels of pollution, less residential tree cover and green space, and warmer surface temperatures in their neighborhoods [ 3 ].

The threat of climate change also has significant implications for the practice of medicine. To effectively care for patients, physicians must understand the ways in which climate change impacts health and be prepared to apply that knowledge through preventive care, diagnostic reasoning, and risk reduction counseling. Physicians’ role in the climate crisis is especially critical as they have been shown to be among the most trusted voices on climate action [ 4 ].

In recent years, there has been increasing awareness of the need for climate education in medical training and interdisciplinary health professions. There is a burgeoning literature documenting progress made in climate education across the medical, nursing, and public health fields, among others. For example, public health scholarship has formulated competency frameworks [ 5 , 6 ]. In the field of nursing, thought leaders have described the challenges of integrating climate education [ 7 ], advocated for educational competencies [ 7 ] and provided recommendations for developing robust climate education for nursing students [ 7 ].

In undergraduate medical education, frameworks for educational concepts, competencies, and innovation in climate education have been described [ 8 – 10 ]. Internationally, institutional efforts to integrate climate education into medical school curricula have been reported [ 11 , 12 ]. Large surveys have evaluated climate change and planetary health educational initiatives in medical schools globally, [ 13 ] and nationally, including the United Kingdom, [ 14 ] Australia, [ 11 ] and Ireland [ 15 ]. In Canada, national surveys were used to understand medical students’ experiences, attitudes, and interests in climate health education [ 16 ]. The importance of innovation in climate education in graduate medical education and post-residency fellowships has also been described [ 17 – 19 ]. These frameworks and curricular advances can further support students and practitioners’ career development in climate related advocacy, policy, research, and education, among other opportunities.

Among U.S. medical schools, there is increasing recognition of the importance of undergraduate medical education in preparing future physicians to incorporate knowledge of climate change’s impacts on health into their clinical practice.

A survey by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) showed that 55% of U.S. medical schools self-reported that the health effects of climate change was a required topic in pre-clerkship and clerkship courses in 2022, more than double the 27% of medical schools that reported such a requirement only two years prior [ 20 ]. Medical schools have begun to describe innovations in climate change curricula, which has been largely driven by medical students, but the field remains nascent [ 21 – 26 ]. Further dissemination of educational innovation reports may inspire medical school administrations to commit to developing climate curricular integrations that are appropriate to their specific context. Continued scholarship in this field is also essential to the development of broadly accepted competency frameworks that are endorsed by medical societies and accreditation bodies and can be readily applied by medical schools nationwide.

To respond to this need, we describe an educational innovation at Harvard Medical School (HMS)—the development, implementation, and evaluation of the longitudinal, integrated HMS Climate Change, Environment, and Health curricular theme. We further describe the process of mapping the curriculum onto a newly developed competency framework.

Approach and methods

Climate medical education was first developed at HMS by the Center for Health and the Global Environment, which was established in 1996. However, in the past decade, HMS offered only ad hoc climate content from a small group of faculty. In 2021, Students for Environmental Awareness in Medicine (SEAM), a medical student group at HMS, conducted an informal poll that found strong interest in climate medical education among their classmates. SEAM presented a proposal for a comprehensive climate curriculum to faculty leadership in August 2021, which was positively received. They subsequently led the development of a pilot lesson on the association between exposure to outdoor air pollution and the pathophysiology of asthma, which consisted of a pre-class preparatory video and assigned questions co-created by students and faculty. Students also secured a faculty mentor to oversee faculty efforts on curricular reform. To draw upon a wider range of expertise, the faculty mentor organized a climate health faculty working group (CHFWG). In August 2022, SEAM and the CHFWG began work with the goal of integrating climate content into every course in the first year of medical school training. With encouragement from the Dean of Medical Education, we began a collaborative process of curricular content development and also began seeking status as a formal curricular theme at HMS, which would help accelerate the development of a formal, required, and sustained curriculum. We received formal recognition as a HMS curricular theme in January 2023. The cohort described and evaluated in this manuscript received exposure to their final pre-clerkship climate curricular integration in September 2023.

Content and pedagogy of longitudinal, integrated curriculum

In the Spring of 2022, SEAM and CHFWG members began co-developing a longitudinal climate curriculum. The initial priority for our curriculum was to lay a strong conceptual foundation in the pre-clerkship phase of the Pathways curriculum track (HMS’s main track) and then subsequently expand climate education into the clerkship and post-clerkship phases and the Health Science and Technology (HST) curriculum track (a joint program with Massachusetts Institute of Technology). The pre-clerkship phase refers to the initial set of classroom-based courses taught in medical school—including anatomy, physiology, immunology, molecular biology, and social sciences—that precedes core clinical rotations. The clerkship phase refers to the collection of core clinical rotations—including internal medicine, pediatrics, surgery and obstetrics/gynecology—that are carried out in clinical settings, such as hospitals and ambulatory care centers. The final climate curriculum that was delivered in the 2022–2023 academic year is outlined in Table 1 .

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000412.t001

Our pedagogical approach intentionally focused on longitudinally integrating content into pre-existing course materials rather than developing an isolated, immersive course. The benefits of such pedagogy has been demonstrated in the literature [ 27 ]. The pedagogical principles of spacing and interleaving were used. Spacing is a teaching practice in which learning is distributed over time, rather than in a consolidated block [ 28 ]. Interleaving is a teaching practice that emphasizes the value of exposure to a variation of topics [ 29 ]. In an interleaving educational approach, learners engage with a specific topic, then leave that topic to learn new topics, and then return to the previous topic for further learning. Both spacing and interleaving practices encourage revisiting material with breaks in between. They were chosen because evidence has shown that they can enhance retention of information and increase capacity to create connections between concepts [ 29 ]. This integrated pedagogical approach also allowed for climate curriculum to be embedded without significant displacement of other educational topics, which was greatly valued by course directors. The format of curricular integrations varied widely and included lecture-based sessions, case-based learning, small group discussions, and clinic-based precepting exercises ( Table 1 ). Moreover, climate content was designed to be relevant to the diverse professional interests of medical students and challenged students to develop an active practice of examining how climate change impacts their professional experiences and interests within medicine.

In the 2022–2023 academic year, the pre-clerkship curriculum described the health impacts of climate change, air pollution, and ecological degradation on the following: vector borne disease, heat stress, mental health, food security, water scarcity, renal disease, allergic rhinitis, asthma, and coronary artery disease. Sessions also highlighted the role of physician advocacy on climate change policy and included a student-led small group discussion addressing hospital sustainability. Throughout the longitudinal curriculum, the intersections of climate change and global health equity, environmental justice, structural racism, and community partnership were emphasized, especially in relationship to Black, Indigenous and immigrant communities.

Curricular design process

SEAM and the CHFWG jointly approached course directors approximately six months prior to the start of each course, providing a rationale for climate medical education and presenting opportunities for climate curricular integrations. Workshop meetings were subsequently scheduled in which students presented ideas for climate integrations. CHFWG members provided climate and health expertise, and course directors offered insight on course priorities, including medical topics taught in the course and any relevant time constraints. These workshop meetings were structured intentionally with a spirit of co-creation among students and faculty with complementary knowledge bases and skill sets. The group explicitly discussed concerns they had about the impacts of climate change on the health of patients, which helped develop a sense of shared purpose and unified vision. Every course director that we solicited responded favorably to the outreach, resulting in new climate content integration into every course for which it was requested ( Table 1 ). SEAM and CHFWG members also prepared a climate and health faculty development session for HMS faculty, organized by the office of the HMS Dean of Faculty Development. After the completion of each curricular integration, SEAM and the CHFWG solicited feedback from teaching faculty regarding their experience delivering the material and that of students receiving the material.

Competency framework

In parallel with curriculum design, the CHFWG and SEAM collaborated to develop a novel competency framework ( Table 2 ). We began by conducting a landscape review of pertinent scholarship of climate education in U.S. medical schools [ 21 – 26 ]. After developing an initial framework, we used an adapted Delphi process to facilitate iterative feedback from stakeholders, including faculty, students, and the Dean of Medical Education. Our competency framework sought to reinforce the medical school’s existing medical education competencies. Our framework includes competencies addressing not only the impact of climate change on clinical practice, but also ones addressing how historical and structural factors exacerbate climate-related health inequities, how the healthcare system contributes to and is vulnerable to climate change, and how health professionals and institutions can contribute to climate solutions. Learning objectives were developed to accompany each competency. Once completed, the competency framework was used by faculty and students to map curricular integrations and develop new evaluation tools.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000412.t002

Evaluation methodology

A retrospective survey was administered in late August and early September 2023 after the final pre-clerkship climate- related curricular integration was presented to the first-year student cohort. While in the classroom, students were provided with a QR code that linked the survey questions. Participation in the survey was optional and the sole eligibility criteria was enrollment in the Pathways track. The HMS Program in the Medical Education’s Educational Scholarship Review Committee deemed this project to be quality improvement and therefore exempt from IRB review. We obtained students’ written informed consent to participate in the evaluation by placing the following statement prior to survey questions, “By participating in this survey, you consent to having your de-identified responses, analyzed solely in the aggregate, used in publications on this curriculum.” We used an eight-item survey to assess students’ perceived belief in the importance and value of the curriculum and their belief in how the curriculum impacted their development in the five curricular theme competencies. A seven-point Likert scale was used for responses to survey questions. Students were also provided with open text fields to comment on their perceived value of the curricular theme and share any additional thoughts. The data was accessed on September 2, 2023 for research purposes and authors did not have access to information that could identify individual participants during or after data collection.

We analyzed the survey results for 100 of 134 (74.6%) eligible students who participated in the evaluation. We analyzed the descriptive statistics for all quantitative items ( Table 3 ) using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 28.0, Armonk, NY: IBM Corp. Responses to open-ended questions were reviewed for quality improvement.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000412.t003

Outcomes and results

Formal curricular theme status.

In 2022, the HMS curriculum formally recognized six curricular themes: Health Equity and Antiracism, Aging and End of Life, Sexual and Gender Minority Health, Substance Use and Pain, Trauma Informed Care, and Interprofessional Education. In January 2023, the HMS Educational Policy and Curriculum Committee approved a seventh curricular theme—Climate Change, Environment, and Health. This approval provided the curriculum with formal institutional status, and thereby created a mandate to integrate required content throughout all four years of the medical school curriculum. A new faculty theme director role was established with financial and administrative support from the HMS Office of Medical Education.

Retrospective data

We found that 94.1% of study participants agreed (defined here as somewhat agree, agree, or strongly agree) that understanding how climate change impacts human health should be part of all students’ medical education ( Table 3 ). Furthermore, 76.0% agreed that the Climate Change, Environment, and Health curriculum theme was valuable, and 80.0% agreed the theme improved their understanding of the health impacts of climate change. We also found that most students agreed that their abilities in each of the five competencies had improved because of their exposure to the curricular theme.

While the qualitative data collected do not meet standards for systematic analysis, there are several informative themes that emerged from review of open-ended comments. Broadly, these themes include a sense that the curricular integrations were: valuable and important to students’ learning in this domain (number of corresponding comments, N = 18); too simple in scope or would have benefited from further nuance (N = 4); not convincingly relevant to the health of Americans (N = 1); not adequately interactive (N = 2); and too limited/additional sessions would have been welcome (N = 3), especially on health equity topics (N = 2).

Students and faculty at HMS were successful in substantially increasing climate content in the pre-clerkship phase, creating a novel competency framework, and ultimately getting a formal institutional commitment for a longitudinal, integrated Climate Change, Environment, and Health curricular theme. Survey data showed that a substantial majority of students agreed that the curriculum was important and valuable, highlighting broad support for our efforts from students. Students largely agreed that the curriculum improved capacity in each of the defined competencies of our framework. However, survey data also showed that a portion (between 18.8% and 35%) of respondents only “somewhat agreed” with the prompts. Additionally, qualitative feedback provided suggestions for areas for improvement.

Having formal theme status at HMS supported effective and synergistic collaboration between students, the CHFWG, course directors and deans in the Office of Medical Education. Student leadership catalyzed both the initiation and development of the curricular theme. Now, as a curriculum with institutional support, the curricular theme seeks to be student-inclusive but not student-dependent. Content expertise from the CHFWG facilitated the depth and breadth of curricular offerings. Significant buy-in and collaboration from course directors and deans provided critical formal institutional support. Furthermore, students and the CHFWG began the process of obtaining formal institutional commitment early on. Achieving recognition as a formal theme status was a critical step in accelerating the pace of curricular development in its first year.

Areas to further strengthen the pre-clerkship curriculum include integrating lifespan approaches, organ-specific approaches, and more detailed teaching of health inequities faced by vulnerable populations. We also seek to increase climate-related skills through project-based learning in areas such as critical thinking, clinical assessment, and health advocacy. It will also be important to create more mentorship opportunities that help students interested in this work reflect on how they can incorporate it into their careers. Previous literature has highlighted the importance of these pedagogical approaches [ 5 – 9 , 11 , 12 ].

With an established first-year, pre-clerkship curriculum in place, further development is underway for the HST track curriculum and the clerkship and post-clerkship phases. Additionally, CHFWG is developing more structured opportunities for mentored projects and career development. We are collaborating with colleagues engaged in university-wide interdisciplinary climate curricular reform efforts across Harvard University. We have received institutional approval to conduct longitudinal surveys to evaluate future cohorts’ experiences of each component of the curriculum, which will allow us to better assess whether each curricular integration meets its objectives and will guide iterative refinement of the curriculum. The retrospective data presented in this manuscript has limitations in that it was a single cross-sectional survey assessment that was delivered at the end of a year of curricular integrations. As the survey was optional, not all students completed it, with a response rate of 74.6%. This response rate may have introduced bias, if those who did not fill out the survey were qualitatively different than those who did. A more detailed, longitudinal survey and a systematic process for qualitative data collection and analysis would be helpful to examining the strengths and weaknesses of each curricular integration.

Given the early phase of curricular innovation in this area, additional scholarship is needed to present different curricular approaches and competency frameworks at all levels of undergraduate, graduate, and continuing climate medical education. Such scholarship may further the development of broadly accepted competency models that can be utilized by medical schools and accreditation bodies. Our work in developing a competency-based, longitudinal, integrated curricular theme is relevant not only for physician training, but for interdisciplinary health professions, many of which are working to significantly expand climate education in their respective fields. Greater implementation of climate medical education and standardization of competencies may help to more effectively train future physicians to understand and respond to the impacts of climate change on health and health equity.

Supporting information

S1 appendix. raw retrospective survey data..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000412.s001

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Dr. Edward M. Hundert, Dr. Bernard Chang, and the Office of Medical Education at Harvard Medical School for their support of this initiative.

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CBC must strengthen its case for our – and its own – survival

Final day! We urgently need your help to fund bold climate journalism by June 3

Sometimes, the CBC is exactly the public broadcaster we need it to be in an emergency.

Witness the first year of the COVID pandemic, when CBC hosts and reporters quickly repurposed their kitchen tables and provided us on a daily basis with the best information available on how to keep each other safe.

Get daily news from Canada's National Observer

More recently, when wildfires were wreaking havoc in my home province of B.C. last summer, CBC radio provided remarkable emergency broadcasting, in some cases making heroic efforts to keep people informed of the latest breaking developments, with front-line reporting that was urgent, relevant and sometimes very moving.

When our public broadcaster shows us its best face in times such as these, we’re reminded why having a media organization that can prioritize clear, factual and compassionate communication over profit is so important to a healthy democracy. And it makes political calls to “defund the CBC” ring especially hollow and tone deaf.

But in the face of the most profound crisis we confront — the climate emergency — we have yet to see the CBC be that public broadcaster. For any of us who follow the daily climate news and science on specialized news sites (such as Canada’s National Observer ), the disconnect between what’s coming and the coverage in Canada’s mainstream media is deeply disconcerting.

CBC must strengthen its case for our – and its own – survival. @SethDKlein writes for @nationalobserver #climatechange #climatecrisis #climateemergency

Failure to connect the dots

One of the dynamics that stymies necessary and bold climate action is that, while a majority of Canadians are very worried about the climate crisis, the level of basic climate literacy in Canada is abysmal. Much of the Canadian public does not understand what actually causes climate change. When surveyed, barely over half of Canadians correctly identify the main source of global warming as the burning of fossil fuels . Hence the seemingly contradictory polling results in support of pipelines and expanded oil and gas development, even as people rank tackling climate change as a high priority. Nor do most people have clarity about what the necessary solutions are, or that these solutions exist. That needs to be urgently remedied.

As fellow columnist Chris Hatch has written : “Voters remain unclear about the real-world steps needed and the rationale behind government policies. Six in 10 Canadians either think we can expand fossil fuels and reach net zero, or aren’t sure. Heat pumps remain mysterious. Electrification and batteries, dubious. About half of Canadians aren’t sure whether solar panels emit more greenhouse gases than they end up saving.” Yikes.

In the face of such low levels of public understanding, we desperately need the CBC to lean into its role as public educator.

A year ago, the Climate Emergency Unit (CEU, with which I work) teamed up with Simon Fraser University’s Community-Engaged Research Initiative (SFU CERi) to investigate the CBC’s climate reporting. Led by Doug Hamilton-Evans and Tara Mahoney, the project saw 30 volunteers across the country spend two weeks between April 24 and May 4 carefully monitor the weekday programming of The National, The Current, The World at Six and eight CBC morning radio shows, using a questionnaire to track the climate reporting they heard. A report summarizing the findings – Quiet Alarm: A Review of the CBC’s Climate Reporting – is available here .

The report’s core finding: while the CBC’s coverage of the climate crisis has improved in recent years and is periodically superb, on the whole it remains “sporadic, inconsistent and often absent in daily programming.” CBC is doing a better job of connecting extreme weather events to climate change (in my observation, even more so since the survey period in Spring 2023). But it is decidedly failing to connect the next dot, namely, linking climate disruption to its primary cause — fossil fuels (with notable exceptions, such as this report , or this excellent Fifth Estate piece ). And the CBC is rarely providing solutions, much less providing its audience with a sense of agency about how we can help bring such solutions about.

As Quiet Alarm notes, the CBC has committed to strengthening its climate reporting and employs some journalists with a keen understanding of the crisis. We have seen the introduction of some new programs such as CBC Radio’s What On Earth , the appointment of a new international climate reporter (Susan Ormiston) and the launch of a new CBC Climate Dashboard that tracks current conditions and extreme weather events across Canada in real time and compares them to historical trends. These are all welcome developments. But Quiet Alarm suggests that the CBC has yet to meet the standards it has set for itself or climate journalism best practices (developed by international collaborations such as Covering Climate Now ) within its flagship national news and local current affairs programs.

Some of the report’s specific findings:

• Only 48 per cent of the broadcasts monitored had a single climate item and of those, half were stories about extreme weather events (specifically wildfires and flooding).
• Of the stories about extreme weather events, 78 per cent failed to mention that climate change makes such events more frequent and severe.
• Only nine per cent of all climate items mentioned the burning of fossil fuels as the primary cause of climate change.
• Only 22 per cent of the climate items clearly discussed solutions to climate change, while only six per cent of those items clearly communicated that there are things the audience could do to address the climate crisis.

The findings varied across regions and programs. Some CBC shows are doing better than others at covering climate. Among the national shows, for example, The Current does notably better than The National . And among local radio morning shows, CBC Vancouver and Victoria provide some very good regular climate programming (such as The Early Edition ’s excellent bi-weekly climate panel with Dr. Melissa Lem and Janelle Lapointe out of CBC Vancouver), while the Alberta morning shows do particularly poorly.

Among the report’s key recommendations:

1. Make the connection between the causes of the climate crisis (the burning of fossil fuels), its consequences (extreme weather events) and the communities impacted here and around the world. It would boost climate literacy if, whenever reporting on extreme weather, CBC journalists were to employ language like “climate-induced extreme weather, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels.” Those few simple words could go a long way to enhancing public understanding of the connections between oil and gas and the crisis we confront.

2. Develop a daily climate emergency report for flagship local and national news and current affairs shows. Ideally, a national climate emergency unit within the CBC could feed daily content to the flagship shows.

Is there enough news for a daily climate report? As anyone who subscribes to Canada’s National Observer knows well, absolutely! There is a plethora of climate news every day, stories both harrowing and hopeful across Canada and around the world, many of them breathtakingly urgent. But most of them are not reaching the CBC audience.

Along with the release of the Quiet Alarm report, the CEU and SFU CERi teamed up with science journalist Ziya Tong to model three sample episodes of what a daily climate emergency broadcast could sound like, which are available here .

As noted, CBC is producing some great climate programming. Too much of it, however, can only be found on specific shows ( The Nature of Things, What on Earth, Planet Wonder ) or when you search for it under the climate banner on the CBC news webpage, where already interested and climate-curious people proactively seek it out. The key is that daily climate reporting needs to be embedded in the CBC’s flagship shows — The National , The World at Six and local radio shows in particular.

If our CBC morning radio shows across Canada can have hourly sports and business reports, then surely the CBC can make room for a daily morning climate emergency report, telling us how this battle of our lives is unfolding at home and abroad. A report that provides a balanced mix of the bad news and the hopeful. A report that provides insight, but also a sense of agency — telling us how we can all play our part, not in a trite way, but in real and transformative ways. Let us hear much more about what other countries are doing to confront the climate crisis — many of which are acting with more determination and focus than Canada — so that our sense of what is possible may expand.

The CBC during the Second World War

As readers of this column will know, I think a lot about emergency lessons from the Second World War. Those learnings have much to offer those in the news business.

In a speech to a conference jointly hosted by The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review in 2019 entitled “ What if we covered the climate emergency like we did World War II? ”, famed PBS journalists Bill Moyers said to an audience of mostly journalists, “Many of us have recognized that our coverage of global warming has fallen short.” He recalled how, as a child, he used to listen to the radio coverage of the war with his parents, delivered by the renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow and his CBS colleagues. Moyers recounts an amazing story about how, on the eve of the war, CBS headquarters in New York felt there had been “too much bad news” from Europe and directed Murrow and his European-based colleagues to produce a song-and-dance feature to lighten things up (what was “hot” in Europe’s capitals). Murrow, who was the CBS “man in London”, called his counterpart in Berlin to relay the instructions, and then told his colleague, “But we’re not going to do that.” Murrow and his colleagues ignored that absurd directive, and instead they were on scene to cover the Nazi invasion of Poland.

For the next two years, the reporting of Murrow and his CBS team, covering London during the Blitz and the rest of what was unfolding in Europe, dramatically shifted U.S. public opinion in favour of joining the war in support of the Allies (their compelling coverage is credited with helping to bring about a 20 percentage point shift — from majority opposition to majority support — before the bombing of Pearl Harbor). Those reporters were, says Moyers, “On the right side. At the right time. In the right way — reporting on the biggest story of all, the fight for life itself.”

And we remember Murrow not as a biased advocate or propagandist, but as among the greatest journalists of the 20th century — we have prestigious journalism awards in his name. In that 2019 speech, Moyers implored an audience of mainly young and soon-to-be journalists, “Can we get this story right? Can we tell it whole? Can we connect the dots and inspire people with the possibility of change? What’s journalism for? Really, in the war, what was journalism for, except to awaken the world to the catastrophe looming ahead of it?”

Here in Canada, in a fortuitous bit of timing, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was established three years before the Second World War. The CBC, then just a radio service, offered daily coverage of the war, with reporting from Europe led by senior foreign correspondent Matthew Halton. And in an era when radio and entertainment options were limited, pretty much everyone shared in the nightly experience of hearing those reports.

Depending on one’s age, the name of Canadian-born actor Lorne Greene conjures up different memories. If you are of my parents’ generation, you likely think of the old TV western Bonanza , in which Greene played Pa Cartwright. If you are a child of the 1970s like me, you may well think of the original (and very cheesy) Battlestar Galactica series, in which Greene played Commander Adama. But before Greene went off to become a Hollywood star, he was a CBC news reader and served in that role right through the war. He was widely and affectionately known then as “The Voice of Doom,” as the Canadian evening news began each night with the latest update from the war, delivered by Greene’s fabulous deep and dramatic voice.

The CBC played a vital role in mobilizing the Canadian public; making the threat real, so Canadians understood what was unfolding as a clear and present danger.

“Surely,” I have been asked, “you are not advocating that the news media become the kind of propaganda outlets we saw in the war.” No, I am not. We want our news to be factual and science-based. But, in the face of a humanitarian emergency and with the fate of civilization as we know it in the balance, I think we rightly want our media to pick a goddamn side. The side of science and of human survival. And if the CBC hadn’t done that in the war, Canadians would have been rightly appalled.

Just as Lorne Greene and Matthew Halton brought Canadians up to speed on the war effort every night during the Second World War — and as CBC did during the first year of the pandemic — today’s flagship CBC news shows like The National and The World at Six can and should do so again.

Rallying to the defense of the CBC

Given a political context in which Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is leading mass rallies in enthusiastic chants to “Defund the CBC,” maybe the CBC should stop playing duck-and-cover and bring on the fight — motivate us to rally to its defense. If the CBC wants young people in particular to find a compelling new reason to care about the public broadcaster’s future, look no further!

As CNO’s Max Fawcett correctly wrote a few months ago, “ the CBC needs to stand and fight ... Rather than hoping for the best, the CBC’s leadership needs to prepare for the worst. That means battle-testing their own assumptions and blind spots and bracing for a political environment where their own existence will be called into question. It means presenting a coherent case for its contributions to Canadian life that acknowledges the rapidly shifting landscape and adjusts the corporation’s aims accordingly. And it means gathering as many allies as possible in order to mount a vigorous defense.” (Although Max may disagree with my specific recommendations on that score.)

The CBC’s own research and audience feedback describes “a hunger for constructive solutions” to the climate crisis and indicates that Canadians want to better understand what can be done.

A 2022 survey by Leger found “most Canadians (80%) indicated that they need more information on climate change.”

True, most young people are getting their news from social media, but the CBC alone is our public broadcaster, with a mandate to inform and enlighten. And its compelling reports and investigations can seed content for social media.

Were the CBC to introduce a daily climate emergency report, it may worry about push-back from some quarters (just as it appears very sensitive to push-back with respect to its Gaza reporting ). The CBC, like all mainstream media, has a deep-seated nervousness of appearing to engage in advocacy, even when that results in “two-side-ism” to a fault. But again, there is no virtue in “neutrality” when confronting a civilizational threat.

Much like the CBC’s dispassionate coverage of the horror and humanitarian emergency that is being inflicted upon Gaza, the broadcaster’s overly passive and inconsistent climate reporting is incongruous with the scale and scope of the catastrophe that looms.

The ubiquity of climate news and the language employed should align with the gravity of what we confront.

As all good journalists can agree, words matter. In 2019, in a welcome move, the British newspaper The Guardian announced it was updating its style guide and would no longer be using the terms “climate change” or “global warming,” swapping that language for more compelling, urgent and scientifically accurate terminology, such as “climate crisis,” “climate emergency” or “climate breakdown.” The CBC has not followed suit.

“We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue,” said Guardian editor-in-chief Katherine Viner. “The phrase ‘climate change,’ for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”

Indeed. But is that a message CBC listeners would take from the coverage they currently hear, or are they being provided with something decidedly more subdued? The tenor and irregularity of climate reporting from our public broadcaster is, at present, at odds with what climate scientists are telling us.

The frequency and tone with which we see and hear about these matters carries huge weight.

This is the fight of our lives, after all. And it is the duty of our public broadcaster, in an emergency, to make that clear.

And just maybe, if we see and hear the CBC acting in our collective defense, we will reciprocate in turn.

• @SethDKlein

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Klein: "Hence the seemingly

Klein: "Hence the seemingly contradictory polling results in support of pipelines and expanded oil and gas development, even as people rank tackling climate change as a high priority."

Give some credit to Canada's petro-progressive leaders. Starting right at the top. PM Trudeau: "Buying the Trans Mountain pipeline wasn't about hoping to turn a profit for the government. It was about making sure that Alberta crude was not landlocked and was not prisoner to one single customer in the United States. "I took a lot of grief across the country for buying a pipeline. But I knew that if we want to be able to pay for the innovation, the transformation of our economy to be greener, to be cleaner, we need to get the best possible price for our oil products now, and that means getting out across the Pacific. That meant twinning the Trans Mountain pipeline. "That's why we bought the pipeline, because it was good for Alberta and it's good for the country." (21-Feb-24)

When the IPCC issued its latest report, then-Environment Minister "Wilkinson reaffirmed Canada's commitment to phasing out fossil fuels and achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050, but said achieving that target will require money generated by fossil fuels." "Ottawa says it needs revenue generated by the Trans Mountain pipeline to fight climate change" (CBC, 9-Aug-21)

"[Liberal MP] Qualtrough says the pipeline is a 'transitionary tool' that will help fund Canada's shift to a more climate-friendly economy."

Then-Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr: "Our plan is to use this time of transition to Canada's advantage by building the infrastructure to get our resources to global markets and using the revenues to invest in clean forms of energy." (2018)

Up until the last minute before Pres. Biden cancelled Keystone XL, the Trudeau govt was still advertising that Canada's climate plan had room for new export pipelines transporting oilsands bitumen. Kirsten Hillman, Canada's ambassador to the U.S.: "Keystone XL fits within Canada's climate plan" (National Observer, 2021)

The Liberals have been hammering on that duplicitous message for years. Echoed by petro-progressive provincial NDP politicians in Alberta and B.C. No wonder progressives believe we can have our cake and eat it too. Maybe if Mark Jaccard's "climate-sincere" Liberals devoted half as much effort to promoting carbon "tax" rebates as they do to flogging pipelines, they would not be twenty points behind in the polls.

Klein: "But in the face of

Klein: "But in the face of the most profound crisis we confront — the climate emergency — we have yet to see the CBC be that public broadcaster."

The CBC is also failing in the face of the most profound humanitarian crisis we continue to enable: genocide in Gaza. As Klein alludes to later in his column. The spineless Mother Corp. is still silencing Palestinian voices and stifling stories on Palestinian loss and suffering. Still refusing to call a spade a spade. Still manipulating coverage to avoid offending the Zionist lobby. And still coming down hard on journalists seeking to give a voice to Palestinian suffering.

"CBC has whitewashed Israel's crimes in Gaza. I saw it firsthand" (The Breach, May 16 2024) https://breachmedia.ca/cbc-whitewashed-israels-crimes-gaza-firsthand/

The CBC's longstanding bias/cowardice on this file makes it hard to defend. Do we rally behind our public broadcaster and strive to improve it — or toss it on the trash heap?

I totally agree. I am so

I totally agree. I am so disappointed with CBC's reporting or lack of reporting on the Climate Crisis. I also feel annoyed that they have resorted to non- news or "fluffy" news stories The National: too many interviews with pop stars, too much sports coverage and some generally petty topics. It seems that the CBC is afraid to have more authentic coverage on Climate Change because they might offend the oil and gas companies. Is this what is going on?

Canadians need to know what is on the horizon in terms of Climate Change. If they knew the truth and understood the causes, maybe more people would be galvanized to do something about it.

And it is true that the CBC is capable of excellent informative news coverage, such as exhibited during the Pandemic.

I shudder at Poilievre's calls to defund the CBC.

This article is right on, the

This article is right on, the CBC seems to do more harm than good on climate. When the government announced EV targets, the CBC went on a bender to discredit EV's. The coverage was slanted to all the things that people didn't like about EV's, but failed to mention any of the benefits. I have no problem with giving people facts but at least cover it properly. In addition they have business friendly panelists who continually mock climate programs as unnecessary and bad for the economy. These panelists are never confronted about their position and allowed to spew partial truths or just flat out misinformation.

the relationship between

the relationship between deforestation (degradation) and climate change is not discussed. Also, the true GHG emissions from the the chain of production in the nuclear industry is deliberately understated where we are told ad nauseum it's clean and even green! Government and the media are captured by industry and greenwashing is the message. Great the National Observer is speaking out.

Something else CBC could do

Something else CBC could do is drive home the connection, to listeners/viewers, between voters saying that they 'get' climate change, then see-saw vote between 2 main culprit parties (one which essentially is still in climate change denial, and the other which makes half-assed measures to 'be on board'); who say they 'get' climate change then drive trucks and SUVs down the highway at more than 120 km per hour while squawking about the cost of gasoline; and who say they 'get' climate change yet squawk when they're told that heat pumps 'cost more money upfront', as if to say "someone else should pay for it if they want me to buy one". I could go on and on.

CBC could strive to get viewers/listeners to think about changing their attitudes on being part of the solution, not part of the problem; to pay attention to the party climate policies and candidate statements in the real media and on social media; and to think about giving a 'new kid' party on the block a reasonable length of time for a chance to govern to implement the changes we need to make. And if that new kid doesn't do it, choose another 'new kid'. What we've been doing so far in voting is failing us.

Give it a try CBC.

More Young Adults Don’t Want Kids in a World Like This Says Study

Young people in England are becoming more disinterested in raising a family due to concerns about climate change, lack of LGBTQ+ care, and misinformation on fertility and miscarriages.

Youth Perspectives on Parenthood

A recent study conducted by researchers at University College London (UCL) revealed that over 33% of adolescents in England express disinterest in having children in the future.

Women in the study were notably worried about the potential dangers of childbirth, and most young people were concerned about the state of the world due to climate change and global conflicts.

Urgent Need for Curriculum Adaptation

Researchers from UCL asserted that updating the relationships and sex education curriculum is imperative to address the apprehensions about parenthood among students.

Other concerns cited in the study were the state of the economy, resulting in potential financial stress, along with the lack of interest in securing the rights of the LGBTQ+ community in society.

Although inflation is looking close to reducing this year, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s recent “joke” about the trans community while the mother of murdered trans teen Brianna Ghey was present in the room supports these ideas.

“The state of the world is in a shambles, “ one student said, “Governments are corrupt. The environment is deteriorating … it would be cruel to put a child through any of our problems, especially since they are not getting better.”

Two Comprehensive Studies

The University College London surveyed 931 school pupils aged between 16 and 18 across 20 schools in England, and the findings showed a staggering number of young people disinterested in bringing up a family.

Although 64% of students expressed a desire to become parents at some point, a staggering 45% harbour reservations about prospective parenthood.

Influence of External Factors

The survey revealed that climate change influenced some students’ desire for children while others were still interested in raising a family but sought alternative paths to parenthood.

Among those disinterested in future parenthood, reasons included the perceived “turbulent state of the world.”

“The environment is deteriorating,” one student told the survey, “it would be cruel to put a child through any of our problems, especially since they are not getting better,” referring to climate change.

Expert Commentary From Joyce Harper

Professor Joyce Harper from the UCL EGA Institute for Women’s Health expressed concern about female students losing interest in future parenthood due to worries about their safety through the process of childbirth.

“Sadly, a number of female students expressed a lack of interest in future parenthood due to their fears about pregnancy and childbirth,” Harper revealed in the study.

Harper pointed out, “Shortcomings in fertility education in schools also meant that students were left feeling both ill-informed and negative towards their own fertility and ability to have children.”

“With regards to fertility education, most teenagers told us they want children in the future but at school we concentrate on teaching them how not to get pregnant, not how to have a healthy pregnancy,” Harper revealed.

Escalating Birth Rate Concerns

According to the Office for National Statistics, Britain’s birth rate is on the decline and currently at a staggering 20-year low, as per the Office for National Statistics.

The government have made it mandatory to teach topics like reproduction and sex education in secondary schools across the country, but students argue they could do better.

Students Want More Out Of Sex Ed Classes

One student argued, “All we’ve done in school is go over and over having safe sex and talked about periods which, whilst it is important, is barely scratching the surface of things people need to know about.”

“If miscarriage and infertility were better taught, then that could reduce the guilt and embarrassment people who struggle with it would feel,” the student argued.

The Department for Education showed they are considering students’ feedback on the current sex education curriculum. Now, they must act to turn around the growing misinformation that females harbour about pregnancy.

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The post More Young Adults Don’t Want Kids in a World Like This Says Study first appeared on Edge Media .

Featured Image Credit: Shutterstock / Thanumporn Thongkongkaew.