National Trends in Undergraduate Exposure to Climate Education

As the global climate system continues to feel the effects of industrialization and a growing global population, companies and public agencies are increasingly developing strategies for enhancing their resilience to an uncertain and changing climate. To meet rising demands for climate-literate workers, undergraduate curricula will require updates such that they provide students with opportunities to engage in climate science education. Previous research on undergraduate climate education has primarily focused on evaluating whether students have grounding in essential climate science principles, but these studies fail to capture the degree to which students feel they are exposed to climate education in their undergraduate programs. In the present work, we characterize the state of undergraduate climate education in the United States. In particular, we analyze responses to a national survey of graduate students (n = 495), which asked respondents to score the levels of exposure they received to a variety of climatological topics during their undergraduate studies, as well as provide information on their undergraduate majors and institutions. Climatological topics covered in the survey ranged from applied (e.g. earth observations, numerical modeling), to interdisciplinary (e.g. agricultural climatology, hydroclimatology, regional climatology) and specialized (e.g. boundary-layer climatology). Our results show that those who received baccalaureate degrees from programs related to human dimensions of natural resources management (e.g. geography, resource economics) generally felt that their undergraduate curricula provided them with exposure to climate education, whereas those who graduated from programs in engineering and the agricultural and life sciences largely reported a lack of climate coverage in their undergraduate studies. Additionally, students of all disciplinary backgrounds indicated that they received poor exposure to numerical modeling of historical and future climatic conditions during their undergraduate programs. Findings from this study underline key areas in which curricular improvements are needed to ensure that the up-and-coming generation of decision-makers has foundational climatological knowledge needed to address the grand challenge of climate change.