College students around the world are feeling deep-seated fear, if not despair. The existential threat of climate change A fear you may have had since childhood. bad weather As temperatures rise and the planet warms inching ever warmer, emotions are running high for many students in the U.S., with many harboring concerns about life on a warming planet.
in Project Information Literacy At PIL, a nonprofit, independent research institute I lead, a group of library and information science and new media researchers, including myself, are conducting a national study of the information-seeking behavior of university students and recent graduates. As PIL’s director and principal investigator with 25 years of experience as a professor of new media and communication theory, I am focused on exploring what student life is like in the digital age.
Earlier this year, we surveyed nearly 1,600 undergraduate students across nine U.S. universities. Larger studies We explored how people living in the United States encounter and respond to news and information about climate change. Our research delved into why some students feel distrustful or ambivalent, while others feel hopeful in a bleak situation. The study was part of a year-long study we led that explored how our vastly different attitudes and beliefs about climate change are shaped by the news and information we encounter, collect, engage with, and share.
Our survey data showed that 78 percent of student respondents said climate change makes them worried about their own future, and 88 percent said they are worried about future generations. “This is our future, and we are watching it be destroyed,” one respondent said in an open-ended question. Another wrote, “I feel like I’m becoming numb to climate change because there is so much damage and loss of life as a result of it. It’s just the new normal, especially for my generation.”
But amid the fears, there are notable glimmers of hope: 90% of survey respondents agree that humanity has the ability to mitigate climate change, 78% believe in the power of individual action, and more than 80% want to be part of the solution to climate change.
For educators looking for opportunities to make a difference, these findings are good news. Even though students feel sad, worried, anxious or angry about living on a planet at risk, many are taking personal action, no matter how small, to combat climate change. Hannah Ritchie, senior research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Global Development Program and deputy editor of Our World in Data, notes the growing interest in taking action on climate change: “A sincere optimism” Richie suggests. Reframing the climate change debate And fostering a sense of optimism and hope can be the first step towards collective action.
in Opinion Essay In a paper published in Scientific American, Matthew Schneider Meyerson, an associate professor at Colby College, writes that the key to talking to students about climate change is to let them express their feelings and fears before presenting the scientific facts. This creates discussion and helps students understand that community action on climate can scale up solutions that counter despair, inform policymaking, and inspire hope.
If college faculty, librarians, and administrators want climate change to receive more attention, they need to know more than just what their students know about the climate crisis. how They know about climate change and understand how it influences their beliefs and attitudes. How do students encounter and respond to the topic of climate change in the media, in conversations with others, and in their relationships with themselves?
Analysis of the survey data found that while the majority of respondents curate an information stream that includes news about climate change, they are not heavily exposed to it: Most respondents said that while they follow all kinds of news, they have only read, heard or listened to “a little” or “a little” news about climate change in the past week.
One reason may be the bleak tone of media coverage of climate change: More than three-quarters of the student sample agreed that “the media focuses on the negative effects of climate change rather than solutions.” What seems to be missing from most climate change coverage, from both the left and the right, is not a sense of urgency, but rather solutions and possibilities for adaptation that offer a way forward.
Anne Previous PIL studies A study of how students engage with the news, conducted among 5,844 undergraduates at 11 US universities, found that the college classroom is an influential environment for discussing news and interpreting current events. In the study, seven in ten survey respondents said they learned about news on a range of topics in discussions with their professors in the previous week.
Open-ended responses to the current survey also revealed that college classrooms are important sources of information for students to learn about climate change and what role they can play in it, with one student stating, “When I hear about climate change, it makes me want to be part of the solution. That’s why I’m studying environmental science.”
While the majority of students say they and those around them, including family and friends, share similar views on climate change, their participation in public spaces is significantly limited: Only 26% of students said they shared ideas or links to news or information about climate change in face-to-face conversations or through social media in the month prior to taking the survey.
This contradiction is one of the complexities that emerged from our findings about climate change discussions: students are motivated to be part of the solution, but they are not actively discussing with like-minded others how they can take collective action.
Surprisingly, many of the students surveyed said they trust the veracity of climate scientists. Such trust translates into efficient decisions about the veracity of climate information: A majority (82%) agreed that scientists understand the causes of climate change, and more than half believed most news about the climate crisis can be trusted.
Many students also said they combined their innate sense of trust with other ways to verify the reliability of news, such as comparing sources to check facts. Many students said they learned about media and information literacy while growing up, and made evaluating sources a habit. This finding supports the success of librarians’ research guidance for students.
The coming generation of college students is the generation that will live with the consequences of the climate change decisions we make now, so knowing their perspective is crucial to addressing climate change today. Given that many people feel overwhelmed by anxiety and despair, we must figure out how to transform their concerns and fears into a sense that we are not hopeless, that collective action is still possible and desperately needed.
An overview of research on how college students are responding to climate change suggests that they are dedicating significantly more attention to thinking about climate change than the general student population. Higher education faculty and administrators have a key role to play in helping students take ownership in confronting global climate challenges.
The classroom may be a great place for instructors to start: a class discussion of news about climate change can help students see the connections between news practices and academics, while also showing them that engaging with the news is a social practice and a form of civic engagement. Social Sciences and Science It has been shown that such discussions can foster critical thinking skills and professional knowledge.
There is still much work to be done to help students turn climate anxiety into shared action, but as one student wrote, “It is so easy to feel despair about circumstances outside of your direct control, but progress always starts from below.”
