Higher Education Webinar: Teaching Climate Change

Alice C. Hill, the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Abigail Meert, CFR associate director of teaching and learning, lead a conversation on teaching climate change and explore CFR Education’s new collection of accurate, accessible, and authoritative resources on climate change and its implications for global issues and foreign policy. Explore these free resources and their accompanying teaching materials here.

 

Speakers
Alice C. Hill
David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment
Council on Foreign Relations

Abigail Meert
Associate Director, Teaching and Learning
Council on Foreign Relations

Presider
Irina A. Faskianos
Vice President, National Program and Outreach
Council on Foreign Relations

 

Transcript

FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to CFR’s Higher Education Webinar. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR.

Today’s discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, education.CFR.org/events, if you would like to share the materials with your colleagues. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

We are delighted to have Alice Hill and Abigail Meert with us to discuss teaching climate change.

Alice Hill is CFR’s David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment, focusing on the risks, consequences, and responses associated with climate change. She previously served as special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, where she led the development of national policy to build resilience to catastrophic risks, including climate change and biological threats. She is the author of Building a Resilient Tomorrow, which was published in 2019; and The Fight for Climate After COVID-19, which was published in 2021; and is also a contributing author to the book Standing Up for a Sustainable World: Voices of Change. And she is also a judge, having served as the judge overseeing superior and municipal courts in Los Angeles. So wonderful background.

Abigail Meert is CFR’s associate director for teaching and learning. She previously served as an assistant professor at Albion College and Texas A&M International University.

So we are going to have them lead the discussion, and then we’ll turn to you for your questions. So, Alice and Abby, thank you very much for being with us. Alice, we’ll turn first to you to give an overview of the state of climate change today, a small subject to be sure. And then Abby will walk through—talk about the importance of climate education and walk us through CFR Education’s new collection of climate resources and best practices for incorporating them into your curriculum. So I’m going to turn it now to both of you.

HILL: Really wonderful to join you. And I will now start sharing the slides.

This is a picture of the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. It’s run by NOAA. It sits a little over two miles above sea level. In 1958, a young scientist, David Keeling, chose this site for its remote setting. It’s far from other continents and substantial carbon sources. It has a lack of vegetation that made it—makes it ideal for collecting pristine air samples. So ever since 1958, for over sixty years, scientists at the observatory have been measuring the level of carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere. The observatory now has the longest continuous record of atmospheric concentrations of carbon that exists in the world.

In 1958, when Dr. Keeling was starting his work, the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide stood at approximately 315 parts per million. Now, that amount was more than what’s estimated to be the amount during the preindustrial era. Then, the concentration is thought to be 280 parts per million. This was a time before humans started burning fossil fuels on a large scale. Since 1958, atmospheric carbon concentrations have continued to rise, with the rate of increase accelerating over time, tripling from the 1960s to the 2010s. And in May of last year, atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa peaked at a monthly average of 424 parts per million. Now, that’s the highest level ever recorded and likely the highest measurement in about 3 million years.

So as carbon emissions from human activity accumulate—I’ll take the next slide, please—they form a kind of blanket around the globe that traps heat. Over time, as the concentration of emissions in the atmosphere grows, the Earth’s temperature rises. Scientists have warned that every incremental rise—I mean just a tenth of a degree in temperature—unleashes worsening, significantly worse extremes. That’s deeper droughts; bigger, hotter wildfires; more extreme precipitation; more intense storms; and sea level rise.

So this slide shows how carbon dioxide emissions track with global average temperature rise. The upward sweep is called the Keeling curve in honor of David Keeling, the scientist who started and initially oversaw the Mauna Loa monitoring system.

So why do we care about more carbon in the atmosphere? The rise in temperature has real consequences. Last year was the hottest year on record, and almost certainly this year will be hotter than last. In the past year, the globe has experienced massive flooding, fast-moving destructive wildfires, extreme temperatures, and extended droughts. These new weather patterns have broken records all over the globe. And with temperatures continuing to climb, even worse extremes lie ahead. Virtually no corner of the planet will escape damage from climate change.

As if this weren’t scary enough, higher temperatures have the potential to cause irreversible tipping points. These are some of the tipping points that scientists worry about. Not all of them will come to pass, but they’re certainly concerning.

So, since the 1990s, nations have been meeting to find ways to address global warming. You may have heard about the UN Conference of the Parties which is taking place right now, as I speak, in Baku, Azerbaijan. It is the twenty-ninth climate conference the UN has hosted, all aimed at curbing heat-trapping emissions to contain rising temperatures.

In 2015, nations agreed to the Paris Agreement. And that agreement says nations should limit warming to well below two degrees Celsius, preferably 1.5 (degrees)—no more than 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels. Right now, the planet is on track, according to the UN, to heat to somewhere between 2.6 degrees Celsius and 3.1 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2100.

Which brings me to my last point. This graph comes from Google Ngram data which tracks the frequency in usage of words over time. I’ve tracked the increase in usage of the words “climate change” and “resilience” between 1880 and 2022. Now, the English philosopher Francis Bacon, who was a polymath, is credited with introducing the word “resilience” for the first time in writing in 1627. The physicist Gilbert Plass is credited with one of the first uses of the term “climate change” in 1956 in relation to carbon dioxide accumulation. This graph, in my opinion, shows—it tracks these dual terms—shows that with climate change we are all going to need greater resilience to the impacts that it brings for ourselves, our families, and our communities.

Climate change is one of the most significant threats humanity has ever faced and the planet faces today. That is why it’s so essential to have quality teaching resources. And that’s why it’s so exciting that CFR Education (CFRE) has undertaken the really important task of creating accurate, timely educational materials about climate change. The more people understand the risks and what they can do to reduce them, the better off we will all be. So I want to turn it over to Abby now to share with you these amazing resources.

MEERT: Well, welcome, everyone, and thank you, Alice. I want to start out by thanking you for your dedication in your work in raising awareness about climate change and combating our current crisis.

My name is Dr. Abigail Meert, and I am the associate director of teaching and learning here at the Council. Today, I look forward to briefly sharing an overview of CFR Education’s work with you all, particularly as it relates to our new suite of teaching and learning resources on climate and energy.

So we all know this: Young people today are constantly on the receiving end of mis- and disinformation online about important global affairs issues like climate change. Young people want and need to be able to separate fact from fiction amidst the deluge of daily news. More important, they need to know how to find, evaluate, and use trustworthy information.

There is today an acute need to strengthen what we at the Council on Foreign Relations refer to as global literacy; or, the knowledge, skills, and perspectives required for a person to effectively engage in their world as a citizen. CFR Education aims to help close the global literacy gap in our country by providing educators and students with accessible, accurate, and authoritative global affairs resources that build the knowledge, skills, and perspective that high school and higher education students need to understand and engage with today’s most pressing global issues—again, like climate change.

And the need for resources is particularly crucial in climate education. As Alice just emphasized, climate change is a defining issue of our time. The climate is changing faster than humans, plants, and animals can adapt, and Earth itself is becoming hotter and more dangerous for everyone everywhere. Sixty-five percent of teenagers want to learn more about climate change, and that interest continues onward into higher education. Young adults aged sixteen to twenty-five show increasing levels of anxiety, anger, and guilt over climate change. They feel helpless and powerless to stop the continued warming of our planet. The college classroom is a critical source of information for helping students learn about climate change, but research shows that instructors often feel limited in their ability to provide climate education due to a lack of resources and also just a lack of confidence.

And that’s where we come in. We at CFR Education believe that educators cannot and should not be expected to be experts on every global issue, especially at the rate at which our world changes. With this in mind, our team is releasing a comprehensive library of, again, accurate, accessible, authoritative, free teaching and learning resources on climate change and its implications for global issues and foreign policy. With the help of CFR fellows, particularly Alice, we have developed a collection of free expert, informed learning resources on the fundamentals of climate change, from the science behind climate change to the social and political impacts of ongoing global warming. We’ve made a point of keeping our resources current, accessible, and action-oriented. And our resources can be accessed individually, in prepackaged collections, and soon as an open-access online learning experience through the Coursera learning platform. And we’ll be releasing that in April 2025.

We also offer climate-themed simulations that invite educators and their students to step into the roles of decision-makers on the U.S. National Security Council and the United Nations Security Council, and I’ll speak a bit more about those in just a moment.

In addition to our—to our simulations, we also offer teaching resources that accompany our learning resources. These include essay and discussion questions, classroom activities, sample syllabi, and professional development opportunities like webinars and conference sessions. And again, I look forward to speaking more about these with you in just a moment.

Now, to bring these efforts to life, I’d now like to take a walk with you through the new CFR Education climate and energy materials. All right. So as I said a moment ago, over the past year our team has been extremely hard at work developing a new and comprehensive library of readings, videos, and activities on the topic of climate change. And again, I want to quickly say that this release is largely due to the support of our fellows—particularly Alice, who you just heard speak. Alice has been an incredible source of knowledge and support for our team as we pursued the release of these materials, and we are just incredibly grateful for her work.

Now, the easiest way to access CFR Education’s new climate resources is by navigating over to our homepage, education.CFR.org, and just scrolling down to this link, “New Climate Resources.” This page features each of our new free resources, both our student-facing resources and those instructor-facing resources that I mentioned earlier. Going in, you’ll see that our team has categorized the new material according to six broad themes. The first theme is understanding the causes of climate change, right here, which provides learners with an introduction to the topic of climate change, the greenhouse effect, and the scientific and human causes of our contemporary climate crisis.

Now, when I click in, you’ll see that we’ve packaged our resources into learning journeys according to the specific theme. Here, we have our learning journey on the causes of climate change, so all of those introductory readings neatly packaged and linked to one another so that students don’t have to do too much clicking back and forth to get a comprehensive overview of climate basics. Our learning journeys are, again, prepackaged collections of our climate resources. Each one starts with an—I’m waving at you—I’m demonstrating with my hands, but I realize that’s not working. All right. So each one starts with an introduction, sort of brief introductory text, and then they link over to the next article in the collection through these arrows at the bottom.

Looking in at a specific learning resource, you’ll see that we have created an in-house built-in glossary so that students can pinpoint and understand key vocabulary terms. You’ll also see that our resources are full of visuals—images, infographics like this one, but even interactive infographics. And that’s all very intentionally done in order to keep students’ eyes on the page and to keep everyone engaged while they’re reading.

Now, going back to our themes, we also have a collection called “How to Mitigate Climate Change” which examines current efforts to reduce climate change through the lens of the leading greenhouse gas emitting sectors as determined by the UN IPCC, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As you can see, this resource—this collection includes resources on the energy industry, transportation, building, and agriculture and land use sectors. And each resource details how each sector contributes to climate change, the various steps that individuals and governments can take to reduce emissions in these sectors, and then an explanation of where we, humanity as a collective, are at in terms of mitigating those emissions.

All right. I’ll give you a closer look. And I am from the Midwest. I’m a little bit partial to agriculture, so I’ll click over to that one. You’ll see that with our resources they start out with a brief introduction with these mitigation ones, then move into talk about how the sector contributes to or worsens climate change. It then goes down to how the various steps that exist to potentially mitigate emissions in these—in this—in this sector. And then it ends—each one of these resources ends with a conversation about where we are now.

Our third collection, “How the World Can Adapt to Climate Change,” is, I think, a really compelling group of materials. Each resource in this group examines a specific climate issue and the steps that different governments are taking to adapt their regions and populations to life amidst these challenges. What I find so distinct and so compelling about this particular set of resources is that they go beyond what I think most students would anticipate when it comes to climate change and the ways in which we experience it. While CFRE, of course, offers resources on the more expected impacts of climate change—biodiversity loss, extreme weather, drought, famine—we also have resources on the less visible or maybe less expected impacts of climate change, including the economic costs of climate change, population displacement due to climate change, and even the impacts of climate change on global health and national security. And from an instructor’s perspective, I want to say that I think these resources can be really great to give students a better understanding of the sheer immensity as well as the sheer complexity of climate change, just to push student understanding a bit further.

The next group of resources is on the topic of geoengineering, or the intentional large-scale alternation of Earth’s environment to counteract human-caused climate change. Now, to be honest, this collection only includes one source right now, but it is a big source. Our geoengineering resource covers different strategies of geoengineering, from carbon dioxide removal and atmospheric scrubbing to solar radiation management and slowing down glacial ice melt. The article also discusses concerns about geoengineering and the contemporary rules, or lack of rules, that govern the use of geoengineering technologies today. And again, this is just one article, but it takes on major themes and it can easily be paired with preexisting materials, including a simulation activity we currently offer on geoengineering, discussion questions on the topic of geoengineering, or articles on AI and other emerging technologies that humanity might consider utilizing to counteract the ongoing climate crisis.

Our fifth group of resources, called “Climate Policy: Opportunities and Obstacles,” works together to inform learners about the various international agreements, domestic laws, and other policy levers that governments can employ to combat climate change. Now, within this collection I want to quickly plug our videos, because I’m not quite sure how they did it but our content team found a way to make combating climate change adorable. And let me show you what I mean. I’m going to scroll down here to access this video. If you watch any of our new videos, you’ll see that each one features these very cute and colorful shapes. From an educator’s perspective, this is a very clever decision. I think we all know that climate change is a politically charged topic. By using such nondescript characters, our team has created a way for instructors to encourage students to explore the issue of climate change in an approachable way without necessarily putting students, who we know hold a diversity of opinions, on the defensive or on the attack.

Our last collection of resources, called “Energy Challenges,” is still forthcoming. But on a broad level, it focuses on the energy sector and the possible array of steps that humanity might take to reduce emissions within that sector.

And that is, of course, a lot of information coming at you all at once. So if I could summarize this conversation about our learning resources, I would say the key things to remember are these.

Number one, CFR Education has reduced a comprehensive library of nonpartisan, science-backed, action-oriented resources to help students and instructors navigate the work of learning about climate change.

Number two, our resources broadly fall into six categories. However, you all as instructors should feel fully free to use or combine our resources in whatever way you see fit.

Number three and last, our resources are all designed with students in mind. From our visuals to the reading level of each resource, our team aims to speak directly to students, not above them and certainly not beneath them.

Now, one last area that I’d like to discuss because we move into questions is about our instructor-facing resources. If you scroll all the way down on that “New Climate Resources” page, you’ll see that we offer distinct teaching resources for high school and higher education classrooms. This collection is constantly expanding, but we currently offer three different resources for higher ed instructors.

These are essay and discussion questions, which as you can see is a large list of questions categorized by the themes that I discussed earlier. Instructors might use these either as thought prompts during class or as writing prompts on homework or exams. Our questions correlate to the learning resources as well as the learning journeys. And, full disclosure, I wrote all of our higher ed materials, so I can say that these resources are designed to encourage higher-order thinking as well as personally engage contributions from students on the topic of climate change.

We also offer two possible classroom activities on the subject of climate change.

The first is a mitigation awareness video where students use information from our mitigation resources to design and film public-facing awareness videos about climate change. Now, the activity includes links to the relevant articles on our website, but it also includes a set of slides you might use in class when conducting the activity as well as a specific instructional plan to help you think through how this might fit into the timing of a regular class session.

The second activity that we offer is called “Climate Prompts: Fact or Fiction,” and this is more of an introductory activity designed to help students begin to talk about climate change with their peers. As someone who often teaches about controversial subjects, I know that just broaching these kinds of conversations can be difficult. This activity is a “where do you stand” activity in which instructors read off a list of prompts attached here and down lower on this page, but in which students move across the classroom in response to the prompts according to how much or little they agree with it. Now a small spoiler: Each of the prompts within this activity is based on a popular misconception of climate change. By addressing these misconceptions in class, my hope is that you all as instructors will be able to do the important work of dismantling these misconceptions with your students over the course of the semester, and to do so in a way that’s responsive to the understandings and baggage that students carry with them into the classroom.

We also offer an abundance of simulation-style activities which ask your students to debate solutions to pressing climate issues, from whether or not to pursue geoengineering to what steps the United States should take to stop deforestation in the Amazon. These simulations are really great to use in the classroom because they require students to do so many things. Our simulations ask students to conduct research into the different topics. They also ask students to conduct research into the different roles to which they are assigned. But they also ask students to engage in civil discourse with one another as they pursue an agreed-upon response to the issue in question.

All right. Now, I do think I’ve spoken enough. So to keep up with us and our new climate content, please make sure that you scan this QR code and sign up for our newsletter. And once you’ve done that, I think we’re good to open the floor for questions. So thank you, everyone. Appreciate you being here.

OPERATOR: (Gives queuing instructions.)

We have a written question from John Eldon, who is a lecturer at the University of California San Diego. He asks: How accurate are our estimates of historical CO2 concentrations?

HILL: Well, I suppose I’ll take that question. If you mean the estimates I gave in the past, those are from scientists who study climate. I haven’t verified them myself. I think they take a number of sources to determine that estimate of what was occurring in the past.

What we do have is a very strong record now of heating since the industrial era, and we have a really strong record with the accounting that’s come from Mauna Loa as well as other places across the globe. So there’s no question that carbon dioxide has risen significantly, and we know for sure in the last sixty years because we’ve actually been measuring it. But also it’s believed historically in the past, from the scientists’ analysis of a variety of sources, as I’ve said—I believe it’s rocks, different geological formations that determine how much carbon was in the air. I will say that the level of carbon today is believed to be the highest in—ever, and it was estimated 3 million years ago, when seas were up to seventy-two feet higher than they are today.

The frightening aspect of this is that there is a delay in how long the carbon takes to heat up the globe. That’s different from methane; methane heats up the globe much more quickly, not as forcefully as carbon. But I have just been talking about carbon today. Methane is also a contributor to the heating that we’re experiencing.

So we do have accurate measurements since we’ve had scientists on the ground. But from—in the past we’ve had to do estimates based on other sources than the carbon itself in the atmosphere and the methane itself in the atmosphere.

OPERATOR: We have a raised hand from Beth Chalecki, who is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha.

Q: Hi. Thank you very much. Can you hear me OK?

HILL: Yes.

Q: Thank you for the information.

Speaking as someone who teaches climate politics in the middle of the country at a state university, our problem with teaching climate change, our difficulty, isn’t lack of scientific information; it’s hostile political headwinds from state legislatures. Do you have any resources for how to do that, how to teach in that atmosphere?

MEERT: So if—

HILL: Abby?

MEERT: Yeah, no, I’m on it.

Beth, thank you for that question. And I want to say that everyone on our team is fully sympathetic to the challenges that you are facing in teaching this very important topic in a context where not everyone wants you to. We do not currently offer those kinds of resources or we don’t offer a specific set of resources designed to target what you’re talking about. We have had a webinar in the past—and it’s recorded, it’s online—about teaching—I think it’s called “Teaching the Headlines” that might be helpful for you.

And I’ll also say that we have—every year we run a Higher Education Ambassadors Program, and this—it’s a competitive program, but it invites professors like yourself to participate in an academic-year-long conversation with other faculty across the country. And during our ambassador meetings, that’s really when we do the bulk of our pedagogy work and the bulk of our conversation—or, the bulk of conversations happen between faculty who are dealing with similar sort of—similar challenges as you are.

And so right now I’m sorry there’s nothing directly on our website that can help you with what you’re dealing with, but I would encourage you to keep our Higher Ed Ambassador Program in mind and to apply for it. I think—I’m not sure when the application comes out, but I’d keep an eye out for that because that would certainly give you an opportunity to speak with other faculty who are dealing with similar issues.

Q: Thank you very much. I might apply to the Ambassador Program.

MEERT: Please do. We’d love to have you.

HILL: I would just like to add two pieces of information that I share when I meet people who are skeptical about climate change.

The first is a quote from the current head of Lloyd’s of London. Lloyd’s of London is an insurance company that’s been in operation for hundreds of years. They started in London in the coffeehouses insuring ships that were crossing the Atlantic or other seas. And that head said, “You won’t meet anyone in the insurance industry who’s denying climate change.” And of course, if you’re following the news there are a number of places that are suffering deeply from rising costs and unavailability of insurance partially because of worsening extremes from climate change.

The other is more personal to me. As Irina mentioned, I was formerly a judge. I don’t think you’ll find a courthouse in the United States where there is a serious argument as to whether climate change is occurring or not, and that’s because the science in this space is so clear. There’s such a strong consensus. Something like 97 to 99 percent of all climate scientists surveyed state that climate change is human-caused. That level of certainty in a courtroom means the evidence comes in and there’s no, really, question about it. They move on to other issues relating to what impacts it’s having and other—other scientific issues may be raised, but that one is not.

And those are the two things I tend to rely upon as I try to say I’m not sure where you’re getting your science from, but this is where—this is what’s happening in the financial world and also in our court system.

OPERATOR: We have another raised hand from John Mathiason, who is a visiting lecturer at Cornell University.

Q: Thank you.

You made it very clear that this is a global problem, but one—and you’ve mentioned the IPCC. One of the issues that I’m not sure that’s being dealt with, and I’d be curious, is the international dimension of that, which particularly has to do with the facts. As you know, the current incoming administration believes that climate change is a hoax. On the other hand, you have the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is run—count them—they’re on the seventh assessment, and each assessment has been more pessimistic than the previous ones, in part because things are changing and in part because they have more data. So the question is, how do you bring in this international dimension which determines to a certain extent the nature of the problem and its solution?

I’ll just make a quick point on your notion that there is an agreement that climate change is happening and it’s human-caused. That was actually built into the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which said that, but then there was no agreement on what to do about it. And that’s been negotiated ever since. So I’d be interested in seeing how you bring in this international dimension, which is critical in deciding what—who do you believe, what do you believe, and to what extent does action to solve climate change require this international consensus.

HILL: Well, Abby, I’ll take a shot at this first. Thank you for the question.

Of course, the international—Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been an authoritative source for CFR. For those of you who are not familiar with that panel, it supports the UN process which has been going on for twenty-nine years, meeting—or, at least meeting for twenty-nine years to talk about climate change among all nations. And virtually all nations are a part of this; over 190 nations have been a part of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change. The IPCC informs the work of—that occurs pursuant to that convention.

The IPCC is a consensus-based effort. Approximately every four years or more, like our own National Climate Assessment here in the United States, scientists gather to review all the peer-reviewed science regarding climate change. So that science that they’re reviewing has already been reviewed for its quality before it’s considered by the IPCC, and then the IPCC synthesizes that science.

Now, in their executive summary, that executive summary is a consensus-based summary. That means all the nations that are party to the UNFCCC agree to what the science is that’s stated in that executive summary. And that’s why there’s really no controversy in—about whether climate change is human-caused—that is a finding, as you’ve said, John—but it is also so authoritative because it rests on peer-reviewed science.

Now, CFR relies on that science going forward. And because we’re CFR, of course, we take an international perspective. And there’s a lot of, really, tensions between nations as to what should happen, and that’s playing out right now in Baku, Azerbaijan. Do the developed world have to pony up more money to pay for the damage to countries that really have had very little to do with creating the climate crisis? Also a question as to whether those developing countries can rely on their fossil fuels to develop, as the developed world did, or whether the developing world will be forced to transition to green energy with no help from the developed world. Very complex international issues.

This is a classic international issue because it affects virtually everyone alive today and will affect future generations, as well as our ecosystems. Every system that we have will be impacted by climate change if it isn’t already. So many issues covered in these materials, but—it’s a very broad topic because it affects everything. But there is definitely an international focus, and it definitely rests on the IPCC scientific findings.

OPERATOR: We have a written question from Andrew Carlson, who is a professor from Metropolitan State University. He says: Hi, and thank you for your work and for the resources. Many of my students in upper-level courses are already highly familiar with climate change and the mechanisms. Beyond individual actions, they would like to find ways to engage in activism with government and community partners. Do you have resources that can help them find ways to advocate for action in municipalities, states, and national agencies?

MEERT: I’ll take this one. So thank you very much for that question.

The short answer to your question would, unfortunately, be no. So we do not currently have those kinds of resources. And in large part, I think that’s because we’re not necessarily an advocacy group as much as we are an awareness group. Our real mission for ourselves is to teach. But that being said, I do think a few of our resources could help your students as they work toward advocacy, and as they learn how to be effective advocates and communicators about this pressing concern.

Number one, I know you’ve said that you are teaching upper-level courses, so forgive me for what I’m about to recommend, which is actually taking a look at one of our high school lesson plans, only because that lesson plan includes a write a letter to Congress activity that your students might find helpful just in terms of having a template if they wanted to send out a written letter to, as you said, local or state governments.

Another thing that I would recommend perhaps you students do either in the classroom or on their own, I’m not sure if you have any kind of climate change group at your institution, but our simulations can be really quite effective in helping students learn how to talk about these issues in compelling ways. And so you might recommend your students maybe put on one or two of the simulations just to help practice.

But I am sorry that the short answer is no.

OPERATOR: We have a raised hand from Jonathan Stromseth, who is professor of the practice at Duke University.

Q: Hi, and thank you for this session today.

I also just want to commend you for your resources generally. I’m a relatively new professor at Duke and I just finished my last lecture of the semester on a global governance course and your materials were extremely helpful through the term.

My question—first, this is being recorded and I assume will be posted?

MEERT: I believe so, yes.

Q: OK.

Anyway, just a little bit—I’m being a little practical here but I’m interested to know—you gave us a tour of what’s available right now. You also mentioned, if I heard you right, that more will be available I think in April of ’25 and I’m specifically wondering—I heard you say sample syllabi a couple times. I will be teaching my first climate course ever in the fall and I’d be curious to know when those are available, what they’ll focus on, and to what extent they’ll be geared toward higher education.

MEERT: Absolutely, and I can speak to this. So what you heard me mention about April 2025 is actually an online course that we are authoring and creating and releasing on the Coursera learning platform. So that course will be free and it will include our existing materials as well as some of our older materials on climate change.

And actually, I misspoke. That’s not just one course; that’s three courses that all fall under a climate specialization. So that’s what’s coming out in April.

Between now and April we are going to be releasing more and more climate resources but alongside that I know that I will be hard at work building out our higher education teaching resources so supports like sample syllabi. I have lots of ideas but you’ve just given me another one, to create a sample syllabus for a college classroom, and so that is something that I am happy to work on.

And I know you said you’re teaching this course in the spring or was it in the fall?

Oh, perhaps they’ve unmuted you. Well, I will do my best to work on that quickly so that I can get that out for anyone who would find it helpful before the new semester starts. Thank you very much for the idea.

OPERATOR: We have a written question from Gerard Robinson, who is a professor of practice at the University of Virginia. He asks: Is there an example of a state with good K-12 science standards in place that provide a platform to teach young people about climate change?

MEERT: Definitely. Yes. All right. So I think the big three states that come to mind for me would be New Jersey, New York, or Connecticut. These are three states that have excellent standards to teach young people about climate change.

One thing I will say, though, is that my experience is really with higher education so I’m going to ask someone to drop this in the chat. But our email address here at CFR Education is [email protected].

On our team we have a person named Charles Hopkins. He has extensive experience teaching K-12 and he is really the one to ask about state standards for teaching climate change. So I’d really encourage you to reach out to that email address. You can ask for him by name—it’ll go to him. But I suspect he can help you a little bit more than I can when it comes to that K-12 education.

OPERATOR: We have a raised hand from Andrew Siwo, who is a visiting lecturer at Cornell University.

Q: Hi. Good afternoon, and thank you.

Many of my students have expressed interest in climate-oriented careers and I’ve directed them to jobs on Wall Street where I work across asset managers, asset owners, and service providers. Where do you believe that career opportunities will exist in the future and are there any resources that I could share with them particularly relating to internships and full-time opportunities? Thank you.

MEERT: Alice, if it’s all right I might kick this one over to you.

Andrew, thank you for your question. I’ll just say that we don’t offer those kinds of resources on employment opportunities but I am also curious to see where these kinds of careers might be.

HILL: Well, I think there will be need and there already is need for well-informed employees on climate change.

Right now because this is an emerging risk and it is a nuanced topic, as some of the questions have reflected, it becomes siloed. So in the corporate setting it might be the corporate risk officer who has it or even the—just the plant managers who are expected to understand climate change.

Going forward, I anticipate more and more that there will be an expectation that all employees have a basic understanding of climate change. Certainly, your students who will be ahead of the game and have an understanding will have more opportunities.

I can tell you it surprises me when I meet with students who are, for example, majoring in foreign relations and I ask them, how many of you have had a class on climate change, and it’s really hit or miss, which is very surprising to me because, certainly, issues of migration, famine, conflict over resources will play and already play a role in foreign relations.

So I think having a basic understanding will help those students be able to get placed including at places like CFR when we’re looking for employees who have an understanding. It’s just going to be an expectation that there be a basic understanding.

I’m not sure that colleges and universities have caught up yet and I know that that’s for a variety of reasons—that they may not have a course offering or they may have course offerings but they don’t have a major yet, for example, in many places for climate change.

So it really falls on the student to take the initiative to educate themselves. But I think those students will be rewarded in terms of jobs. Of course, their jobs, as you’ve referenced, in the financial sector for sustainability officers, for—I’m not so sure there are many for ESG right now because ESG has become so politicized.

But in terms of assessing the geopolitical risks from climate change as well as the risks to one’s operations or a company’s operations and assets there’s a great need and it has not been fulfilled yet to have those kind of personnel.

Also in the government, now, understanding that we have a different administration right now who may not be recruiting for people who have an understanding of climate change, the government is going to have a great need for personnel who understand the risk from climate change and can help communities make better choices as to how to prepare themselves ahead.

It affects everything so from public health to finance to geopolitical relations and a basic understanding will help any student. I don’t know if that’s a good answer. And then the obvious jobs are also in the green groups. I think there are internships at the likes of Sierra Club, NRDC, EDF, where students can further their understanding of environmental harm.

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next written question from Mojúbàolú Okome, who is a political science professor at Brooklyn College. She asks: What does the future hold concerning U.S. policy on climate change, given the rhetoric of the president-elect? I’m thinking about the phrase “drill, baby, drill” and thinking that climate change is a hoax, et cetera.

HILL: I’ll take this Abby. I believe that we will see a slowdown in climate action as the result of the change of administrations.

Some of the actions that the Biden administration took, which has been—was the most active administration ever on climate change, some of those actions will probably be embedded and not reversed in the coming years. But, certainly, if the United States pulls out again from the Paris Agreement as they did in 2016 at the direction of then President Trump, or more serious even if they pull out of the UNFCCC framework, that will have significant consequences in the rest of the world. Unclear what the lay down will be if those events happen. Certainly, something that’s being actively discussed in Baku is the possibility that China will step up and try to fill the leadership void that the United States leaves.

Another concern is that other fossil fuel economies will double down on their production of fossil fuels as they watch the world’s largest oil producer conduct even more drilling to produce fossil fuels. It’s unclear. I think it’s pretty well-accepted that it’s not good news for the climate to have an administration that is expressing skepticism to the facts of whether it’s occurring and to the source of the change. So we’ll have to see.

A number of the appointments that he’s—that President Trump has proposed have a history of promoting fossil fuels as well as deep skepticism about climate change and that will presumably deter government action on climate change from the federal government. That won’t be true in many of our states. As we saw in 2016 the states did step up and that’s anticipated that California, New York, and others will take a very active role in promoting greater climate action within the United States.

OPERATOR: We have a written question from Andrea Cameron who is at the U.S. Naval War College. She says: I’m reviewing the excellent simulations and mini simulations on your page. Can you discuss how long these simulations take and what level of student these are designed for?

MEERT: Yes, of course, and thank you for calling them excellent.

Our simulations—so we offer two different kinds of simulations. We offer full-length simulations, which I would say would take three to five sessions of a regular college classroom and I think those full-length simulations even include calendars of how a professor might run them. Our mini simulations, those would generally take maybe one to two class sessions, although they could certainly be built out more.

Now, I am saying class sessions thinking about, you know, your average ninety-minute class or sixty-minute class. But we do have some of our higher ed ambassadors who are using the simulations in graduate classrooms, either doing those in one or two of their three-hour seminars, and I know this is the higher education webinar but I’ll say that we also have some folks teaching in upper levels in high school who are also using our simulations.

So they can really be taught at all different levels. I think the complexity of how you do it, that depends more on the instructor and how deep you want to take it and how extended of an experience you want it to be.

But they are excellent and actually we just ran one within our department and it was really quite incredible to see people take on these kinds of questions in these kinds of roles. So if you’re thinking about running one I would say absolutely go for it.

OPERATOR: We have a written question from Fernando Reimers who is professor of international education at Harvard University. He says: The first chapter in his book Education and Climate Change: The Role of Universities reviews evaluations of curriculum on climate change and concludes that most of those show that teaching students the science of climate makes them more skeptical that we can tackle this issue. What are your thoughts on how to teach climate so it actually helps students develop agency and hope to do something about it?

HILL: Abby, I can take this.

I think that’s an excellent question and, certainly, there is a great deal of skepticism that’s expressed by students on a variety of subjects. I think one of the unfortunate developments that we have is that these climate impacts are coming fast and furiously.

When I started in this field in 2009 we had to speak hypothetically about the trends we expected in extreme events. If an extreme event—a flood, a wildfire, or a drought—occurred we had to be very careful to say we cannot be sure that this event was worsened by climate.

We now know from another group of scientists—the attribution scientists—that they can quickly assess, based on historical data and other data, whether an event was worsened by climate change, and not all extreme events are but some are definitely worsened, for example, most recently Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton here in the United States.

So I think that hook of—just watch your media. If you see quoted someone—and almost invariably this occurs after a particularly devastating event—someone’s quoted as saying, “I’ve lived here, sixty, thirty, forty, whatever amount of years and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Well, that’s undoubtedly true but with climate change we will be seeing more events like this and we are breaking records all over the place. So I think it’s looking at the evidence that we have now already and there’s no doubt about it that we’re suffering greater extremes and focusing on that to motivate them to go ahead.

I haven’t read that book. I appreciate your drawing my attention to it and I intend to investigate it. Thank you.

OPERATOR: We’ll take the last written question from Ivan Ramirez, clinical assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Denver.

To foster critical thinking, do your resources offer questions or exercises that raise ethical questions about responsibility and help students to understand climate justice?

MEERT: Yes, we do.

So we have a lot of different resources. Well, let me start out by saying our team we’re fully aware of the need not just for resources on the science of climate change but also resources on the social and political dimensions and so with—of climate change.

So with that said, we offer many, many resources that deal with the kinds of questions your students are interested in. Off the top of my mind, we have a resource that just came out. It’s called “How to Make the Green Transition Just and Equitable.”

Many of our resources also deal with the question of responsibility for climate change between historical contributions of climate change versus contemporary contributors to climate change, and those include one written resource called “Who Releases the Most Greenhouse Gasses?” and we have another really compelling video called—I think it’s called “Who Is Responsible for Combating Climate Change.”

Within those essay and discussion questions I showed earlier, I’ve really tried to use those to get into these questions of climate change as an equity issue and thinking through the nitty gritty of how maybe an industrializing country might sort of deal with the question of how and whether or not they even should be combating climate change.

So, yes, we have lots of resources on that and I am confident that we will be adding more resources to deal with those kinds of ethical questions.

FASKIANOS: Great. Well, thank you both very much. I am sorry we couldn’t get to all of your questions. But this has been a terrific hour and as you can see CFR is committed to providing free resources to deepen your students’ understanding and to help make your jobs easier. We’re here to be a resource for you. So, again, thank you to you both for this.

As I said at the top, we will be posting the video and transcript to this session so you can go back and review it and share it with your colleagues, please. We want to get the word out.

I encourage you to follow us at @CFR_Education on X and you can go to the education website, education.CFR.org as well as CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues.

We look forward to your continued participation in CFR programming, and as always please do share your suggestions and feedback. We’re looking to innovate and iterate and improve on what we’re offering and develop new materials that would be useful to you all.

So again, thank you, and we hope you have a great day.

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