Teaching climate Solutions at the “We Can Fix It World Café”

Teaching climate change at university is essential to educate scientifically literate citizens who can make informed choices. Today’s college students were born into a world warmer than the 20th century average; they have never experienced a “normal” climate, and they will live their lives in an era of climate change. 

But, news flash: climate change is depressing! There is abundant evidence showing in increasingly stark relief that a +4°C world is a scary place- one we all have an interest in avoiding. We are in a critical time for climate policy, where we have a narrow but decisive window of time to change course, find new opportunities and avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

LUMES students analyzing the Deep Decarbonization report as part of the "We Can Fix It World Cafe".

Link to lesson plan for the We Can Fix It World Café

As Diana Liverman wrote in the Washington Post, focusing on only the grim projections along our current trajectory overwhelms and depresses students, and makes them feel powerless to act. Rather than rallying them to unite against a negative future, this approach actually decreases the motivation that drove many of them to study the environment in the first place. Surely this is not why professors want to teach, to extinguish rather than fuel their student's fires. 

Fortunately, there are solutions to turn the tide on climate change. As the world gears up for a UN conference in Paris in December 2015, where all countries are supposed to reach an agreement about greenhouse gas emissions, there has been a recent flurry of climate action and proposals, from the US-China climate deal to limit carbon emissions to grassroots campaigns to divest- moving financial investments away from fossil fuels. 

I've designed a teaching activity for master's students in my Earth Systems Science course to discuss and debate a range of climate change solutions. It fits within the framework I've used to design my teaching on climate change, which consists of five points that I first heard articulated in a lecture by Jon Krosnick at Stanford, based on his research with colleagues: it's warming, it's us, we're sure, it's bad, and we can fix it. People need to understand all of these points to get the whole picture of what climate change is, why it matters, and to be motivated to address it. It's essential to include the last point to leave students inspired rather than depressed. 

Students comparing proposed solutions at the poster session.

The "We Can Fix It World Cafe" is a three-hour teaching activity where students critically engage with a dozen proposals for climate change solutions, from sources ranging from the World Bank to student ideas crowdsourced by the MIT ClimateCo Lab. The students first discuss a proposal that they've read in small groups and summarize it on a poster, then share their findings between groups, then share with the whole class in a poster session. I was introduced to the World Cafe method ("a simple, effective, and flexible format for hosting large group dialogue") by my former student Chad Boda. I used this activity to end my Earth Systems Science course this year, and it was satisfying to conclude with a lot of buzz and positive energy from the students. 

As Chris Field, IPCC Co-Chair and my PhD advisor, recently said at Stanford about climate solutions: "The longer you wait, the more it costs, the more complicated solutions get to be, and the more ... impacts you deal with. There's no reason to wait, because there are smart, effective, low-cost things we could be doing today." In addition to addressing the essential first four points, I think professors really need to include "we can fix it" on the syllabus, to prepare our students to be leaders in the world they are inheriting and shaping.