Starting this fall, 7,000 new San Diego students will take courses that include a portion of climate-related topics.
In the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” the vice president of the United States between 1993 and 2001, Al Gore, raises Americans’ awareness of the risks linked to climate warming. In those years, environmental commitment concerned smaller areas of American society, and that is why Al Gore decided to make it a collective objective during his mandate. Over time, environmental protection has gathered more and more support within society. A study of Gallup shows that in 1995 only 25 percent of Americans were concerned about the effects of global warming while in 2021 the percentage had risen to 43 percent. Today that interest has even entered the DNA of the University of California in San Diego, which has decided to introduce compulsory courses on climate change starting this autumn. This is the first course of its kind at an American public university.
The will of the teacher
The project will start this year but is the result of the initiative of Jane Teranes, the late professor of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the world’s largest centers for land and ocean scientific research which has long supported the introduction of a climate course. In compliance with the teacher’s wishes, the University of San Diego created the Jane Teranes Climate Change Education Requirement which is the requirement for climate change education. The 7,000 new students enrolling at UC San Diego starting this year will be required to take courses that meet this requirement. We are talking about around forty courses which will have at least thirty percent of the contents dedicated to the climate and to two areas to be chosen from: the scientific basis of climate change, its human impact, the strategies that can be used to mitigate the changes and methods of Project-based change learning, developed to provide students with some practical grounding in climate studies.
Generation Z is worried about the climate
The course on climate change is aimed mainly at Generation Z children (born between 1995 and 2010). We are talking about a generation that is very attentive to environmental issues. A study this year by Curtin University highlighted that 80 per cent of young people in Australia have major concerns about climate change. One solution according to the researchers would be to actively engage in alleviating climate anxiety and promoting change. “Generation Z should figure out how to be part of the solution to climate change in their personal lives, whether it’s carefully choosing the products we consume or the food we eat. This is one way you can make a difference and help make them feel better,” he explains Diana Boguevaresearcher at Curtin University.
A future of hope?
The University of California, San Diego said it expects more climate change courses to be added to its offerings in the coming years. However, this is not the first case in the world. The University of Barcelonaat the request of the student movement End Fossil, organized a course on “ecosocial crisis” in February this year, compulsory for all students and teachers in which thousands of people participated. Our country just has to learn.
⚠️Occupy the UB Central⚠️
We want the university to be at the forefront of the fight against the eco-social crisis.
It needs to adopt leadership towards the new system, ceasing to be a vestige of obsolete fossil capitalism. pic.twitter.com/NVfZ4rmmsG
— End Fossil Barcelona (@EndFossilBCN) November 2, 2022
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