Ignorance and apathy are not a winning combination when facing down an existential threat. But that’s exactly what Susie Jaramillo, of Encantos Media, found when her team was conducting focus groups with tweens. They were working on their just-released educational video series on climate change, “This Is Cooler.”

“There’s misconceptions around what is actually causing climate change,” she said. “There are so many false narratives: Kids think it’s litter, pollution or a hole in the ozone layer. Zero knowledge in terms of solutions, and zero awareness in terms of the jobs that are available.”

Only two of sixteen 10- to 12-year-olds interviewed could explain the basic facts of climate change; one had done a fifth-grade research project and the other had visited the Climate Museum, a temporary exhibit in New York City.

On top of not knowing the facts, kids this age expressed some pretty dark feelings. Jaramillo said she heard “a lot of lizard brain negativity; doom and gloom. There’s a lot of cynicism, sarcasm — adults dropped the ball. There’s a fatalist mentality — ‘there’s nothing we can do, so oh, well.’”

Meanwhile, teachers report a confidence gap in teaching about climate change. Many say that they feel ill-equipped to tackle it, even as most agree it’s important to teach, and that their students are bringing up the topic and are concerned about it.

One potential ally that could help: educational media. In a 2021 survey of education professionals by the company Kaltura, 94 percent said that video increases student satisfaction and directly contributes to an improvement in student performance.

But a report I co-authored with Sara Poirer in 2022 for This Is Planet Ed, an initiative at the Aspen Institute (where I’m an adviser), found that children’s media is still largely silent on climate. Zero of the most popular family movies of 2021 referred to climate change or related topics, and even when reviewing educational, nature and wildlife-themed TV shows for kids, we found that only nine of 664 episodes, or 1.4 percent, referred to climate change.

Related: Little kids need outdoor play – but not when it’s 110 degrees

To help break the silence, This Is Planet Ed now has a Planet Media initiative, dedicated to encouraging creators to make more scientifically accurate and entertaining media that engages kids on the causes, solutions and even the opportunities to be found in our changing climate.

Planet Media supported the creation of Encantos Media’s just-released “This is Cooler” video series, which is aimed at tweens. It uses a combination of live action and animation, with snappy editing, plenty of humor and positivity, to get across some basic info in terms kids can understand. For example, it compares heat-trapping greenhouse gases to a too-thick blanket making the planet warmer. The series also looks at green career opportunities, like solar panel installer or sustainable fashion designer.

Jaramillo said she was inspired by successful YouTube influencers who inform while they entertain. “It’s super engaging,” she said. “It’s not your typical climate education video.”

Just like the tweens she talked to, many children’s media creators also hold the misconception that climate change equals doom and gloom. I’m currently running an informal survey of people in the children’s media industry for a chapter in an upcoming book on climate change education. More than four out of five of our respondents agreed that “children’s media should cover climate change, its causes, impacts and solutions, in developmentally appropriate ways.”

But when asked why there isn’t more coverage of the topic to be found already, the top three responses were “creators don’t have the background knowledge,” “too scary” and “too controversial.” One respondent, who works in climate change education, said, “My children (ages 6 and 8) no longer want to watch nature documentaries because they always manage to describe how climate change threatens or is killing wildlife and their ecosystems. It’s too scary and they feel helpless.”

Related: How student school board members are driving climate action

One of the most successful kids’ science media creators out there says that doesn’t have to be the case. “It’s important to meet kids where they are. To care about the planet you first have to love it,” said Mindy Thomas, co-host of “Wow in the World” from Tinkercast. The kids’ science podcast reaches about 600,000 unique listeners a month. And at least one in five episodes touches on the environment.

Thomas and her team participated in Planet Media’s recent “pitch fest,” an open call for more content that puts across the core facts of climate change in an age-appropriate way, as well as depicting solutions. “We wanted to use our platform to help elevate this important initiative,” said Meredith Halpern-Ranzer, co-founder of Tinkercast. “Climate activism is always something we’ve been really passionate about.”

Often, Halpern-Ranzer and her team find their “wow” by focusing on emerging climate solutions, like a plant-based substitute for single-use plastic, or white paint that can cool down a city. Last fall, they launched Tinker Class, a National Science Foundation-funded hub for teachers to use the podcasts in their elementary school classrooms, as the instigators for “podject-based learning” activities (the “Wow in the World” team really likes puns). About 2,000 teachers have participated so far. Similarly, This is Planet Ed has created an “educational guide” to reinforce the key messages that Planet Media content is trying to get across.

Ashlye Allison teaches fifth grade in a Title I elementary school in South Seattle. She crafts her own curriculum on climate change, following the Next Generation Science Standards, which seek to improve science education using a three-dimensional approach.

“I want it to be connected to their daily lives and what’s going on in Seattle, and about, ‘what can we do about this?’” She showed the “This Is Cooler” video to her students, and said they found it more engaging than other videos she’s used in class.

Just as Jaramillo found, Allison said her students especially liked the video’s reference to solutions like solar power and electric school buses. “If it’s just doom and gloom, nothing can happen, and so I don’t care. That’s what my kids took out of it: solutions. That’s what they quoted the most, is how to fix it. And I think they would be interested in more ways people are fixing different problems.”

This column about climate change outreach was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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MIAMI — Shiva Rajbhandari doesn’t want you to think there’s anything impressive about the fact that he ran for a school board seat at age 17.

He doesn’t want you to consider it remotely awe-worthy that he campaigned on a platform to turn his Idaho district into a leader on climate change, or that he won, against an incumbent, in the highest-turnout school board election in Boise history.  

What’s impressive, he says, are his Boise public school teachers, who educated him on climate change beginning in seventh grade, not because of any state science guidance but because they recognized its importance. They also “told me every single day that your voice is powerful, that you can make a difference,” he said. 

“This is something that should be accessible to every student,” Rajbhandari, now 19, told an audience at the Aspen Institute’s annual climate event earlier this month. But “not every student has that.”

Rajbhandari, like many of those I spoke with at the Miami event, sees education as fundamental to reducing the harms of a warming planet. By giving young people the skills and resilience to fight climate change, and by harnessing school systems – often among the largest employers and landowners in communities – to reduce their carbon footprint, education can unleash positive changes for a less-apocalyptic future.

“We must recognize that education is the climate solution,” said Rajbhandari, who spoke on a panel organized by This is Planet Ed, an Aspen project that has pushed to get education on the climate agenda and vice versa.

Here are some of my takeaways from the conference, both in terms of how climate change is affecting students and learning, at all education levels, and how education systems can tackle the problem.

Early education:

• Danger lurks for the youngest kids: Kids ages zero to 8 are especially vulnerable to climate change and its harms, such as heat waves; it’s also when kids’ brains are developing most rapidly and laying the foundation for climate resilience is especially critical, said Michelle Kang, chief executive officer for the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
• No need to wait until kindergarten: Kids can be introduced to activities like composting and recycling,and values around a healthy planet, at very early ages, Kang said.
• It’s about access, too: Kang mentioned visiting a child care program in Texas that had lost its shade structure in a storm and no longer had a way to take kids outside safely in the heat of the day.

K-12:

• Money, money, money: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal and the Inflation Reduction Act contain hefty financial incentives and support for schools to reduce their carbon footprint through solar rooftops, electric buses and building efficiencies. Many don’t know of those opportunities, speakers said. 
• Confront the topic differently so it’s not just “the polar bears are dying, the seas are warming and the coral reefs are bleaching, and people in sub-Saharan Africa may not in 50 years have enough to eat,” Rajhbandari said. The issue is urgent, immediate and personal, he noted, but students also need to know they can have a positive impact: “The key there is talking about solutions and talking about agency.” 
• Silence won’t help: Laura Schifter, an Aspen senior fellow who leads This is Planet Ed, recalled hearing from a student who’d become alarmed by a U.N. report about climate change and was shocked that no adults in her school were talking about it. “She started to think, am I the crazy one, that I’m so worried and no one else is worried?” Schifter said. 
• A perfect storm: Climate threats are sharpening the focus on other threats to public schools, like expanded school choice and vouchers. Luisa Santos, a Miami Dade school board member, noted public schools in the city serve as hurricane shelters. School privatization could complicate that role if fewer school buildings are district run and are instead led by many different private operators, she noted.

Higher education:

• New world, new needs: Climate change is starting to reshape the workforce, with new opportunities in renewable energy, sustainability and other sectors, speakers said. Higher ed needs to identify these new needs and help prepare students to fill them, said Madeline Pumariega, president of Miami Dade College.
• For example: She noted that her college started a program for automotive technicians focused on electric vehicles: “We can have the workforce so we don’t find ourselves saying, well sorry, we were trying to do this but we didn’t have the workforce to be able to.”
• Changing existing programs: Colleges are increasingly infusing climate studies into an array of fields – culinary students need to learn about reducing food waste, while future nurses need to know about mitigating the health effects of climate change, speakers said.
• Change begins on campus: There’s also a push to incorporate campus sustainability efforts into coursework. At University of Washington at Bothell, for example, students in several majors worked to restore campus wetlands. At Weber State University, in Ogden, Utah, students in engineering and other fields helped make buildings more efficient. And SUNY Binghamton offers a class called “Planning the Sustainable University” in which students have developed dorm composting, improved furniture reuse rates, and more. 

It’s sobering to contemplate climate change, especially from Miami, where sea level rise threatens to swamp much of the city in the coming decades. But I was reminded of messaging I heard at last year’s Aspen conference, from Yale University senior research scientist Anthony Leiserowitz: “Scientists agree, it’s real, it’s us, it’s bad, but there’s hope.”

Important sources of that hope are students, educators and school systems.      

This story about climate change solutions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletters.

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