The majority of people in the United States want the government to do more to address climate change, according to a 2020 study by the Pew Research Center, yet few of them can be counted as “climate literate”—which the North American Association for Environmental Education defines through metrics such as being able to understand essential climate principles, assess the credibility of climate information, and make “informed and responsible decisions” where their actions may impact the climate.
The purpose of being climate literate is not just to gain scientific knowledge, but to uncover climate perspectives and solutions that can inspire action. In 2023, Allianz surveyed Americans to see how climate literate they were, asking scientific questions like “What is the impact of the rise in temperature?” as well as political ones like “What is COP?”, referring to the annual Conference of the Parties meetings that broadly discuss climate action among U.N. member nations. Researchers found only five percent of Americans had a high level of climate literacy.
To close this gap in climate literacy, a burgeoning movement of students and professors is pushing for climate literacy to be integrated in general education. Some efforts have already succeeded, such as at the University of California, San Diego, which in 2024 became one of the first universities to require that all undergraduates complete a general education course related to climate change. The push to implement this requirement was the result of a student-faculty alliance that has been organizing toward “climate education for all” since 2021. Arizona State University also revamped its general education requirements in 2024, making a three-credit sustainability course mandatory for incoming students. The University of Massachusetts Amherst has a robust climate literacy program, though the university has not yet included this in its required coursework.
UC San Diego’s victory recently inspired a group of thirteen professors at the University of California, Davis, to propose a Climate Crisis General Education requirement for undergraduate students. Former UC Davis undergraduate students Chely Saens, Meghan Van Note, and Trisha Trilokekar wrote that since “climate issues affect all fields of study, the new study requirement would ensure that every student, regardless of their major, gains a broad understanding of climate science, justice, and solutions.” The proposal has collected at least 530 endorsements from various student and staff groups across campus. Should they succeed in implementing it, a graduating class in the near future would be required to learn about sanitation, clean energy, sustainable communities, and responsible consumption and production. Most of the proposed courses for the climate change requirement would overlap with existing general education requirements.
Mark Huising, who teaches neurobiology and physiology at UC Davis’s College of Biological Sciences, was part of the group pushing for this general education requirement. “It’s part of our core mission as faculty—especially of higher learning—to make sure that the teachings that we do are broadly applicable and useful to the students that we teach,” he tells The Progressive.
Huising says he saw the stakes of integrating climate education into undergraduate studies in 2018, when a student in the front row of one of his courses raised their hand and to be excused, having just found out their home had burned down in the Camp Fire. It pushed Huising to think more deeply about how to teach at a time when many students (and faculty members) are impacted by climate disasters.
He continuously sees students dealing with environmental issues that interfere with their education. “Air quality concerns are front of mind,” Huising says. “More regularly we have people in our community who are facing extreme heat in combination with housing instability.”
He says the group who worked on the general education proposal wanted to make sure the required course didn’t just focus on the scientific elements of climate change, but also “the human connection,” including perspectives on climate justice and solutions that intertwine with coursework in urban planning, public policy, renewable energy, public health, law, ecology, politics, sociology, and journalism. This, he says, instills a “sense of urgency” and agency in creating a graduated workforce “ who knows how to navigate this information landscape around climate change.”
But the proposal is currently a standstill. Earlier this fall, the Academic Senate at UC Davis, the faculty governance system, declined to implement the proposal, citing logistical issues such as concerns about the school’s capacity to implement a new general education curriculum on a campus with more than 30,000 undergraduates. “ We can’t create a requirement for students and then set them up to not be able to take classes that they need, or increase their time to [earn their] degree,” Huising says. Still, he says, the proposal’s proponents believe they can address these concerns with a carefully planned curriculum rollout, and are currently working to address the concerns and bring the amended proposal back to the Academic Senate.
Huising and his colleagues have brainstormed ways to broaden the range of courses that could fulfill the requirement by enriching courses in the current curriculum with climate-focused lessons. For him, this means teaching his physiology students about the impacts of extreme heat on the human body. Similarly, one of his colleagues in the Department of Entomology and Nematology is incorporating lessons on how Indigenous land use and water management practices can control insect populations in wetlands in the Central Valley. The English department, meanwhile, is adding literature courses focused on climate issues to its course catalog.
At Harvey Mudd College, a private liberal arts school in Southern California focused on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), chemistry and climate professor Lelia Hawkins hopes to create a permanent climate-focused general education course. A current class called “STEM & Social Impact” is temporarily focused on climate change until next spring. “The question is, do we keep it on climate or do we do something else like [artificial intelligence] or other big sticky problems?” Hawkins says.
The course is currently taught by an interdisciplinary group of seven professors, including Hawkins, who teaches basic earth science principles for the class. Three of the course teachers are humanities, social sciences, or arts faculty, while other four are STEM faculty.
Hawkins says it’s important for the climate change requirement to have a permanent place in curriculum, given the implications of global climate change for her students’ futures, “and the fact that we have to vote for people who are going to weigh in on policy choices related to climate and energy and resilience and planning and adaptation.” If students are not adequately informed about what climate change is and what can be done about it, she says, “they’re going to be much less able to be productive participants in a functioning society that’s going to tackle this.”
An established requirement should have some basic earth science content, Hawkins says, but also an equal measure of historical context around climate policies. “You cannot avoid the partisan climate conversation,” she says. “I think having a really open, productive conversation about how it has become such a divided issue is really important.”
Similar to UC Davis’s proposal, Hawkins says a focus on climate solutions is essential in these courses, because without it, “it’s depressing to some students to the point of being immobilizing or debilitating.” Solutions-focused learning gives a vast array of students an opportunity to understand how they could play a role in the solution space given their own strengths and abilities. “They might want to be an artist or an engineer or a computer scientist or a historian or a tradesman—or whatever they want to be,” Hawkins says, “but there’s going to be a way that they can work on a solution for climate if they want to with those skills and interests.”
At the end of the day, Huising says there is “not a large ideological opposition to doing this, but people are very comfortable not making a change in how we do stuff . . . . And very importantly, when we survey our students and when we talk to our student leadership on campus, there’s widespread support for this,” Huising notes.