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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