Education and Climate Change

Front matter

International Explorations in Outdoor and Environmental Education

Fernando M. Reimers Editor

Education and Climate Change

Contents

1 The Role of Universities Building an Ecosystem Fernando M. Reimers

2 Learn to Lead: Developing Curricula that Foster Climate Chante Leaders, ¢co0iicecdvcends eoeteeendncatebedinngbindad 45 David Rhodes and Margaret Wang

3 Creating a Culture of Shared Responsibility for Climate Lina Lopez Lalinde and Carrie Maierhofer

Chapter 1 A)

The Role of Universities Building giente an Ecosystem of Climate Change Education

Fernando M. Reimers

1.1 Introduction. The Paradox of Climate Change and Education

Along with many species on the planet, polar bears are experiencing the effects of climate change. As rising temperatures produce ice loss, the bears lose the platforms they use to hunt seals. This change to their habitat has placed polar bears on the list of species on the risk of extinction in the wild (Pidcock 2015). The bear floating on a melting ice platform has become an icon for the potentially devastating consequences of climate change to life on the planet.

Like bears, humans also face risks to their habitat and survival resulting from climate change, such as the intensification of the wildfire season ravaging the West Coast in the United States, or more intense storms, droughts and floods, rising sea levels or increasing temperatures. Unlike bears, however, humans have invented an institution to help us quickly adapt to and mitigate changing trends: schools. Furthermore, because climate change is largely the result of human-environmental interactions (IPCC 2018, p 53), schools can do more than help us understand these changes to our habitat, or help us adapt to those changes, they could help us slow down those changes and mitigate their impact, as we adopt practices that are more sustainable, and perhaps even revert them, as we invent technologies that transform the drivers of climate change.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has established that human activities have caused global temperature to rise about 1.0 °C degrees above preindustrial levels (before the 1880s) and that, if increases continue on the current trajectory, global warming will likely reach 1.5 °C between 2030 and 2052. These changes to climate pose risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth, and will increase as temperatures reach

F. M. Reimers (|) Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: Fernando_Reimers @harvard.edu

© The Author(s) 2021 1 F. M. Reimers (ed.), Education and Climate Change, International Explorations

1.5 °C and increase further as temperature increase to 2 °C above preindustrial levels. The impact of global warming of 1.5 °C and beyond will be greater on disadvantaged and vulnerable populations, indigenous peoples, and communities whose livelihood is dependent on agricultural or coastal activities. Global warming will also contribute to increases in poverty (IPCC 2018, p. 4-9.) and will have a disproportionate impact on women who are poor and from other disadvantaged groups and whose livelihood depends largely on agriculture.

“Differences in vulnerability and exposure arise from non-climatic factors and from multidimensional inequalities often produced by uneven development processes (very high confidence). These differences shape differential risks from climate change. People who are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally or otherwise marginalized are especially vulnerable to climate change and also to some adaptation and mitigation responses (medium evidence, high agreement). This heightened vulnerability is rarely due to a single cause. Rather, it is the product of intersecting social processes that result in inequalities in socio-economic status and income, as well as in exposure. Such social processes include, for example, discrimination on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, age and (dis)ability.’ (IPCC 2014, p 54).

The IPCC identifies a range of education options to adapt to and mitigate climate change, including awareness raising and integration of climate change education in school curricula, gender equity in education; and various forms of adult and nonformal education, including extension services; sharing indigenous, traditional & local knowledge; participatory action research & social learning; Knowledgesharing & learning platforms and disseminating information on hazards and vulnerability (IPCC 2014, p.27).

Educating people for more sustainable ways to relate to our habitat involves preparing us to adopt sustainable practices that reduce our impact on climate change and the impact of climate change in our lives. These practices may be individual, in the choices we make about our own consumption and lifestyle (for example slowing down population growth, consuming a diet with a smaller carbon footprint or using renewable energies, or consuming less), or they may be collective, the result of choices we make as citizens when we participate in the democratic process at various levels of government, our towns or cities, states, or nations, or when we influence the behavior of corporations (for example adopting caps to emissions or a carbon tax, or incentivizing the reliance on clean energies). Government policies such as caps on emissions are essential to slowing global warming, and they are subject to influence and preferences by citizens, educated to understand the scientific consensus on climate change and with the capacity to exercise influence as citizens. Collective responses may also include shaping the way in which we live and our habitats, for instance the value we assign to nature as we design and build the homes and cities where we live and work.

In addition to personal responsibility for our individual impact on climate change, and participation in collective processes that support systemic changes in the norms and institutions that undergird climate change, slowing down, and perhaps over time reverting, climate change requires also advancing knowledge and inventing technologies that can help us transform our interactions with the environment, in a way helping us reinvent our way of life, and so educating for

1 The Role of Universities Building an Ecosystem of Climate Change Education 3 sustainability involves equipping people with the ethical frameworks, the imagination and the necessary skills for such advancement of knowledge and invention. Example of such design and invention and changes to our way of life include developing a circular economy with production of goods next to cities to reduce transportation costs, as well as urbanization with populations concentrated in sustainable cities, or geoengineering the atmosphere to partially block the sun’s rays.

An example from the field of sanitation will illustrate the value of technological invention to address climate change. In his efforts to improve health and sanitation in the developing world, Bill Gates concluded that the toilets and water treatment systems developed and in use in the early industrialized world were inadequate to improving sanitation in developing countries because they were resource intensive, generated excessive waste and required intricate and expensive sewer systems to operate. As a result, as an approach to dispose of human waste, toilets are likely to remain out of the reach of a significant share of the world’s population. This caused him to undertake projects to stimulate innovation in the design of next-generation toilets that could operate without sewer systems and that could be extended to all of humanity within a relatively short period of time (Brueck 2019; D’ Agostino 2018). Similar technological breakthroughs could change our dependence on fossil fuels, help us produce much safer nuclear energy, increase the efficiency of fossil fuels and of clean energies. But it is not just technological advancements that can help us reinvent a way of life, inventions in how we organize our lives and work, and in how we organize our communities can help us mitigate and adapt to climate change. For example, structuring some workplaces in ways that allows working from home can reduce our consumption of fuels. Ethical and spiritual development can stimulate such social innovation and lead us to make different choices placing different value on individual consumption relative to protection of the environment, other forms of life or cause us to seek greater balance across a range of goals in the communities of which we are a part. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, for example, are a framework of seventeen interdependent goals that aim at producing a world that is more inclusive and sustainable, and they can provide a normative framework to guide the development of communities, cities, or other jurisdictions.

The motivation to invent more sustainable ways of life requires more than an understanding of the science of climate change, the capacity to design technological innovations, or an ethical framework that help us aspire to live in more inclusive and sustainable communities, it requires an understanding of social systems and the development of ethical reasoning that can help us integrate critical thinking about the current impact of climate change, our moral imagination, the personal motivation to act and our competency to act in effective ways. An example of the integration of understanding of complex social systems with ethical reasoning would be engaging students in projects that helped them understand the gendered experience of climate change. A number of reports explain that the dependence of women in developing countries on natural resources makes them particularly vulnerable to climate change. The challenges are greater for women who secure water, food and fuel for cooking and heating and whose livelihood depends on agriculture. A number of studies of the gendered nature of climate change argue that these differences are the result of various intersectionalities that place particular groups of women (poor, lower casts) at greater risk (Arora-Jonsson 2011). Therefore, understanding intersectionality is necessary to better understand the gendered impact of climate change. The drivers of these gender differences include disparities in access to education, use of time, access to credit and markets, recognition of rights within legal frameworks, and resulting disparities in earnings (UNDP 2013) so understanding these drivers requires understanding systems and complex causality. The recognition of the gendered impact of climate change is the foundation for the recognition of the co-benefits between gender equality and climate action (UN Women 2016) this provides an opportunity for students to understand deeply complex social action and how “equity, sustainable development, and poverty eradication are best understood as mutually supportive and co-achievable within the context of climate action and are underpinned by various other international hard and soft law instruments” (IPCC 2018, p 54).

Developing the moral imagination of students through Human Rights education or education for social justice, cultivating their capacity to recognize how the impact of climate change varies for different people (women, minorities, the poor) is a necessary step to animating them to engage with the subject at greater levels of complexity and inventiveness.

As illustrated with the previous discussion of the complementarities between gender equity and climate change, given the multidimensional nature of the impacts of climate change underscored in recent reports of the IPCC, effective collective responses require addressing the systems that undergird such multidimensional processes. This understanding has led to a growing realization that climate action is best undertaken in coordination in the context of poverty reduction and sustainability efforts, such as those reflected in the development compact adopted at the UN 2015 General Assembly: the Sustainable Development Goals. Advancing such systemic multidimensional efforts requires that we educate students to understand systemic complexity, and develop their capacity to collaborate with others to influence social systems.

“Differences in vulnerability and exposure arise from non-climatic factors and from multidimensional inequalities often produced by uneven development processes (very high confidence). These differences shape differential risks from climate change. People who are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally or otherwise marginalized are especially vulnerable to climate change and also to some adaptation and mitigation responses (medium evidence, high agreement). This heightened vulnerability is rarely due to a single cause. Rather, it is the product of intersecting social processes that result in inequalities in socio-economic status and income, as well as in exposure. Such social processes include, for example, discrimination on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, age and (dis)ability.” (IPCC 2014, p 54).

To sum up, human competencies, the knowledge, motivation and skills of people, are critical to adapting to and mitigating climate change. Developing those competencies is, however, a very tall order, one that requires focus and specialization.

1 The Role of Universities Building an Ecosystem of Climate Change Education 5

This potential of education to affect human-environmental interactions has given rise to a new educational domain of education: climate change education, a subfield of education for sustainable development. Much has been written, and is being done, to educate students to understand, adapt to and mitigate climate change. Governments around the world, in partnership with organizations of civil society and with other institutions, have developed climate change curriculum and adopted policies to address this serious risk faced by humanity. International organizations, UNESCO in particular, have advocated extensively for climate change education and developed and distributed resources to support it. In spite of these efforts, education has not yet sufficiently curbed the impact of our own species on climate change, nor have we yet adapted to these climatic changes and as a result, like polar bears, we are witnessing the destruction of our habitat, much of such destruction of our own doing, and wondering whether we will, along with other species, survive such changes.

“Short of some technological revolution that would transform global energy use, we should be concerned, even alarmed, about the future impact of climate change on the world. It is the quintessential global challenge in that no single country can solve this problem on its own and there is no way for any single country to shield itself from its effects. Generating the required collective response, however, seems highly unlikely. As a result, climate change could conceivably be the defining issue of this century.” (Haas 2020, p. 192).

1.2 Climate Is Changing Faster Than Attitudes and Behaviors About Human-Environmental Interactions, and Knowledge Is Not Enough to Cause People to Adapt or Mitigate

While there is arguably more interest around the world in environmental sustainability, and in climate change, than at any time in human history (Mayherfeld and Askhood 2015), it is also the case that our climate challenges are greater than ever. The question then is not whether the environmental movement has increased awareness and action to address climate change, the question is whether it has done so on a scale and level of effectiveness commensurate with the nature of our present challenge and with the velocity at which the challenge is augmenting.

A recent survey of sustainable development experts and practitioners from business, government, NGOs and academia reveals that more than half of those surveyed believe that the rate of progress with respect to climate change is insufficient to avert major damage to human, social and ecosystem health, and less than a third of them believe that good progress is being made implementing the global framework adopted in the Paris agreement (GlobeScan 2017, p. 4). Furthermore, climate optimism (the belief that society is making progress fast enough to avert major irreversible damage to human, social and ecosystem health) has declined considerably over the last fifteen years. In North America, close to 20% of respondents believed it likely or very likely that we were making adequate progress in 2003, compared with 11% in 2017. Climate optimism, has also declined for the rest of the world, from 11% in 2003 to 5% in 2017 (GlobeScan 2017, p. 11).

The most recent World Economic Forum Report on Global Risks identifies climate related risks as the most likely of all risks humanity faces. They include extreme weather, climate action failure, natural hazards, biodiversity loss and human made environmental disasters. Of those, climate action failure, biodiversity loss and extreme weather are also among the five most potentially impactful risks (World Economic Forum 2020).

Climate change, observable changes in climate patterns resulting from a warming of the temperature of the atmosphere, is the result of human activity, principally burning of fossil fuels which release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere where they trap the sun’s rays, thereby increasing temperature. The five warmest years since 1880 have all occurred since 2015 (NOAA 2020). Climate change is causing increases in sea levels in coastal areas, more severe storms, higher temperatures and increasing desertification and wildfires. This will reduce productive land. Rising temperatures and salinization will endanger many life forms, crop yields and disease prevalence. Freshwater shortages, extreme heat, flooding and storms will cause large scale migration. The two main drivers of climate change are consumption of fossil fuels and deforestation (Haas 2020, pp. 183—186).

Increases in consumption of fossil fuels stem from the growing levels of consumption and waste produced by a growing population and by the energy and waste produced by modern manufacturing. Consumption, population growth, energy and waste are therefore the major drivers of climate change producing significant release of carbon dioxide and other bases into the atmosphere which trap heat. The resulting warming of the planet is causing rapid and extensive biodiversity loss and land degradation (UNEP 2012; UNESCO 2016). Over the last fifty years fossil fuel consumption has tripled, largely a result of increases in transportation, construction and industrial manufacturing (Haas 2020, p. 185).

Scientists have identified boundaries for ten systems that affect life for humans and other species: freshwater use, land use, phosphorus pollution, ocean acidification, climate change, ozone depletion, nitrogen pollution, biodiversity loss, aerosols and chemical pollution. While we have no data on how aerosols and chemical pollution has changed since preindustrial levels, for eight of those system metrics for which we do have data to compare pre-industrial revolution levels to current levels, five of them exceed the boundaries representing high risk that life is not sustainable. These systems are: ocean acidification, climate change, ozone depletion, nitrogen pollution, biodiversity loss. Furthermore, the remaining three metrics: freshwater use, land use and phosphorus pollution, have changed significantly, in the direction of the increasing risk boundary. Only two of the eight metrics (ocean acidification and ozone depletion) have current values which are lower than the values before the industrial revolution, although they remain above the proposed boundary representing high risk (UNESCO 2016, p. 20). The most commonly accepted explanations for those changes focus on overpopulation, modern lifestyles and individual behavior (UNESCO 2016), as well as industrialization and the release of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

1 The Role of Universities Building an Ecosystem of Climate Change Education 7

Population growth, and the energy and resources that more people consume, is a major driver of climate change. It took one thousand years for the world population to grow from an estimated 190,000,000 in the year 200 to 360,000,000 in the year 1200, and another six hundred years to reach one billion in the year 1804. But the improvement in life expectancy associated with medical and public health developments grew the world population by an additional billion people in barely a century. Then, in less than four decades, world population grew from 2 billion in 1927 to over 3 billion in 1960. The next additional billion in world population took only fourteen years, exceeding four billion in 1974. The next billion humans took only thirteen years, the next billion twelve years, and the next additional billion another twelve years, until the world population reached more than seven billion by 2011 (Worldometers 2019). Such exponential growth in the number of humans making demands on the planet is a driver for the changes to the environmental systems discussed earlier. Some of those demands on natural resources and on the atmosphere are the product not just of the number of people but of particular forms of consumption, of forms of life and social and economic organization. For instance, construction, transportation and manufacturing account for most of our consumption of fossil fuels. Circular economies and alternative forms of urbanization can reduce these costs of transportation and construction.

Providing individuals with access to jobs and income, so they can sustain those forms of consumption, and the necessity to grow aggregate economic output to expand such access in the face of a growing population, has been a widely accepted view of ‘progress’ for many nations for much of the twentieth century. Only during the last decades of the century did the notion that there may be tradeoffs between jobs and consumption, or economic growth and sustainability, become increasingly accepted among government leaders and development professionals, this shift was significantly aided by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit) which took place in June 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (UNCED 1992). The question of what constitutes development, and how to integrate sustainable development with other social and economic goals, such as poverty reduction and improvement in material standards of living, is at the heart of today’s conversation about what is sustainable development. As with climate change, if such conversation is to have any consequence on the ten systems which are moving the planet towards levels of increased risk for life, it needs to move beyond a conversation among elites in governments and international organizations, and become part of how most humans on the planet think about what is a good life and how they make individual and collective choices that lead to greater sustainability. For instance, governments could agree on a total amount of emissions or on a tax of emissions, something no government has yet endorsed (Haas 2020, p. 189). Similarly, individuals could choose to protect natural habitats and consume less, including reducing their living space, or change their diet, as a way to reduce their carbon footprint.

Climate change education must equip most humans with the knowledge, critical thinking skills, understanding of science, and ethical frameworks, that helps them with mitigation, adaptation and reversal of climate change. Mitigation involves trying to slow down the rate of climate change. Adaptation involves reducing the impact of climate change on people. Reversal is a nascent area involving geoengineering, such as planning particles in the atmosphere to partially block sun’s rays (Haas 2020, p. 191).

This means that climate change education should go beyond equipping people with the skills to understand climate change, important as that is. It must equip them to understand tradeoffs, to make choices and to invent solutions that can help us integrate choices that are environmentally sustainable within a larger framework of how we live. A simple way to represent the choices involved in mitigation would be to ask how much people are willing to give up, or to pay, or to change their lifestyle, to reduce their own carbon footprint, for example demanding that their governments adopt cap and trade that limit the total emissions or a carbon tax. Educating people for adaptation involves knowledge and skills to change their lifestyles in ways that are responsive to the impact of climate, for example influencing how they build or rebuild their cities so they are more resilient to coastal flooding. Finally, educating them for climate change reversal requires developing the talent and ingenuity that can lead to technological innovations. This means education not just to understand, but to act effectively, in influencing not just personal patterns of consumption, but with the agency and efficacy to collaborate with others to influence the complex systems which undergird climate change.

Awareness and knowledge about climate change appear to be insufficient because while there is evidence that a significant percentage of people are already aware of environmental degradation, and consider it a challenge, climate continues to change. The World Values Survey, a project coordinated at the University of Michigan, collects data from representative samples of the population in a large number of countries on a range of issues. When people were asked to identify the most important world problem, environmental degradation is considered one of the most important problems in the world, second only to poverty which is considered the most important problem by most people in most countries. Environmental pollution is considered the most important world problem in more countries than discrimination against women, and also more important than poor sanitation and infectious diseases. Only with respect to poor education is the number of countries that see this as the most important problem in the world similar to those who see environmental degradation as the most important problem. The results can be seen in Table 1.1.

However, even though people are aware of the importance of environmental sustainability, there is less evidence that they have the skills to translate such awareness into actions that contribute to more sustainable ways of living. This is because human behavior with respect to relating to the environment is not just a function of what we know about that relationship, but about how we weigh the tradeoffs involved in relating in different ways. People may be aware of the fact that walking or riding a bicycle have a smaller carbon footprint than using other forms of transport, and still prefer the convenience, or the income they could draw from the time saved, associated with public transportation or even private transportation. Few workplaces allow extensive telecommuting for work even though doing so would reduce the carbon impact of transportation, and of office space. There are today, effective alternatives to air travel, in the form of highly effective telecommunication

1 The Role of Universities Building an Ecosystem of Climate Change Education 9

Table 1.1 Percentage of representative samples of adults who see the following as the most serious problem in the world 2010-2014

People Poor

living in Discrimination sanitation and

poverty and | against girls and _| infectious Inadequate | Environmental

Table 1.1 (continued)

People Poor

living in Discrimination sanitation and

poverty and | against girls and | infectious Inadequate | Environmental

Source: Inglehart et al. (2014). World Values Survey Database technologies with a lower carbon footprint, and yet many people and organizations continue to depend on in person meetings that require air travel, including meetings to discuss how to address climate change.

It is the way most people respond to those tradeoffs that is of greatest consequence to how we relate to the environment, not just the simple ignorance of the facts about the consequences of our actions or knowledge of our alternatives. Existing evidence suggests we are still very far from living in a world in which most people are prepared to value environmental sustainability over other desired goals, such as high levels of consumption, or jobs. One of the questions in the World Values Survey asks respondents to choose between the statement that ‘Protecting the environment should be given priority, even if it causes some loss of jobs’ and ‘Economic growth and creating jobs should be the top priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent’. For all the countries participating in the survey, on average only 47% of the respondents favored the environment over jobs. The percentage who responded this way varied across countries as seen in Table 1.2, from a high of 74% in Malaysia, to a low of 4% in Haiti.

1 The Role of Universities Building an Ecosystem of Climate Change Education 11

Table 1.2 Percentage of the population who thinks that protecting the environment should be given priority even if it causes some loss of jobs between 2010 and 2014

Country Percentage Malaysia 73.6 Colombia 67 Chile 66.7 Philippines 64.9 Uruguay 64.2 Qatar 63.1 Sweden 62.9 Peru 62.9 Mexico 62.8 Uzbekistan 62.1 Ecuador 61.2 Taiwan 60.6 Brazil 60.3 Kyrgyzstan 59.3 Georgia 59.1 Australia 59 Hong Kong 58.6 India 58.4 Thailand 57.5 China 56.6 Belarus 56.2 Libya 54.5 Argentina 54.2 Kazakhstan 53.9 Morocco 53.2 Ghana 50.3 Russia 50.2 South Korea 48.2 Turkey 48 Ukraine 47.7 Germany 47.7 Estonia 47.7 Cyprus 47 Palestine 46.8 Pakistan 45.7 Slovenia 44.5 Iraq 43 New Zealand 42.6 Singapore 41.1 Netherlands 40.9

Table 1.2 (continued)

Country Percentage Armenia 40.1 Lebanon 39.9 South Africa 38.3 Poland 37.6 Zimbabwe 37.3 United States 37.2 Jordan 35.8 Spain 35.2 Romania 34.8 Nigeria 33.8 Yemen 33 Tunisia 32 Algeria 31.2 Azerbaijan 31.1 Egypt 30.5 Kuwait 27.2 Japan 22.7 Rwanda 22.1 Haiti 3.8

Source: World Values Survey database. Inglehart et al. (2014)

The relative value people assign to environmental protection over jobs and growth is related to the economic opportunities available, as demonstrated by the case of the United States. Each year, since 1985, the Gallup organization has asked representative samples of Americans whether the environment should be protected, when this goal conflicts with economic growth. During the thirty-four year period over which these data have been collected, a greater priority was given to economic growth during the years when unemployment rates were higher. The figures reported in the previous table from the World Values Survey for the United Sates correspond to a peak in unemployment, over 8% between 2010 and 2013. In 2019, a period of low unemployment at 4%, most respondents, about three in five, agree that environmental protection should be prioritized over economic growth. These fluctuations notwithstanding, however, the percentage of the population who thinks the environment should be protected is very similar in 2019 (65%) to levels in 1985 (61%), even though education and public awareness of climate change have increased during this period (Saad 2019). It is also unclear whether the level of education greatly impacts those choices, though it presumably impacts knowledge of climate change. In the United States, college graduates are only slightly more likely to favor protecting the environment (67%) than those without college degrees (62%).

It is possible that the reason there are few differences in how people with different levels of education, and presumably knowledge, value the environment, is because values, rather than knowledge, play an important role. There are significant

1 The Role of Universities Building an Ecosystem of Climate Change Education 13 differences by age and political affiliation in how likely people are to favor the environment, which suggests that these are valued based choices, not just knowledge-based choices. Among those aged 18-24, 78% would favor environmental protection when it conflicts with economic growth, compared to 58% among those aged 25-54 or to 60% for those over 55. Among Republicans, 35% would favor environmental protection over economic growth, compared to 71% among independents and 82% among democrats. This suggests that if education is to influence how we relate to the environment, it must activate our moral imagination, our capacity for ethical and critical thinking and not just dispense us with more facts.