College students around the world have deep-seated fears, if not despair about the existential threat of climate change â fears they may have harbored since childhood. As the frequency of severe weather events increases and the Earthâs temperature inches upward, emotions have intensified for a lot of students in the United States and it turns out that many keep their concerns about living on a warming planet to themselves.
At Project Information Literacy (PIL), the nonprofit independent research institute I lead, a group of library and information science and new media researchers â including myself â conduct national research about the information seeking behavior of college students and recent graduates. As the director and a principal investigator at PIL with 25 years of experience as a professor of new media and communication theory, I’m focused on investigating what itâs like to be a student in the digital age.
Earlier this year, we surveyed nearly 1,600 undergraduate students from nine U.S. colleges and universities as part of a larger study on how people living in America encounter and respond to climate change news and information. Our survey delved into why some students are distrustful or ambivalent while others still have hope in the midst of gloom. This research was part of a yearlong study we led, examining how our sharply divergent attitudes and beliefs about climate change are shaped by news and information we encounter, curate, engage with and share.
According to our survey data, 78 percent of the students who responded indicated that climate change made them anxious about their future and 88 percent reported that they are anxious for future generations. As one respondent put it in an open response question, âThis is our future, and weâre watching it be destroyed.â Another wrote: âThere has been so much damage and loss of life as a result of climate change that I feel as though Iâm becoming numb to it â itâs just the new normal, especially for my generation.â
Amid the anxiety, however, are notable glimmers of hope. Of our survey respondents, 90 percent agreed that humanity has the ability to mitigate climate change, 78 percent believed in the power of individual action and more than 80 percent were motivated to be part of the climate change solution.
Thereâs good news in findings like these for educators looking for opportunities to affect change. Even if students say they are âsad,â âworried,â âanxiousâ and âangryâ about living on a planet in peril, many are taking individual steps to fight climate change, no matter how small they seem. Hannah Ritchie, senior researcher in the Programme for Global Development at the University of Oxford and deputy editor at âOur World in Dataâ refers to the growing attention to do something about climate change as âurgent optimism.â Ritchie suggests reframing how we talk about climate change and that developing a sense of optimism and hope can be steps toward collective action.
In an opinion essay published by âScientific American,â Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, associate professor at Colby College wrote that the key to talking with students about climate change is letting them express their feelings and fears before introducing any scientific facts. Thatâs when discussions can happen and students can see how community climate action amplifies solutions, which can then counter despair, inform policy making and spark hope.
If faculty, librarians and administrators at colleges and universities want to bring more attention to climate change, itâs critical to understand not just what students know about the climate crisis but how they know it and how this shapes 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 relation to themselves?
When analyzing our survey data, we found that most student respondents curate information streams that include climate change news, but they are not consumed by it. While they followed news of all kinds, most said they had read, listened to, or heard only âsomeâ or âa littleâ climate change news during the past week.
One reason for this may be the bleak tone of climate change coverage by the media. More than three-quarters of the student sample agreed with the statement, âThe media focuses more on the negative impacts of climate change rather than solutions.â What appears lacking in most climate coverage from left- or right-leaning sources alike is not so much a sense of urgency, but possible solutions and adaptations offering a way forward.
An earlier PIL study about how students engage with the news involved a survey of 5,844 undergraduates at 11 American colleges, found that the college classroom is an influential incubator for discussing news and interpreting current events. In that study, seven in 10 respondents to our survey said they had learned of news about a range of topics in discussions with professors during the preceding week.
From open responses to our current survey, we learned that the college classroom is also a crucial source of information for helping students learn about climate change and what role they might play in doing something about it. As one student put it, âhearing about climate change makes me want to be part of a solution, itâs why Iâm studying environmental science.â
While a majority of students say they had similar opinions about climate change as people in their orbit, including family and friends, their participation in the public square was notably limited. Only 26 percent of students said they shared ideas or links to climate change news and information through in-person conversations or on social media in the month prior to taking the survey.
This contradiction is one of the complexities that surfaced from our findings about climate change discourse: Students are motivated to be part of the solution but theyâre not actively talking with like-minded people in their lives about how they could collectively take action.
Surprisingly, many of the students we surveyed say they trust the veracity of climate scientists. This kind of trust gets parlayed into making efficient decisions about truthfulness of climate information: A significant majority (82 percent) agreed scientists understand the causes of climate change, and more than half believed most news about the climate crisis was credible.
Many students also expressed that they combined their innate trust with other methods of verifying the reliability of news, like comparing one source with another for fact-checking. While growing up, many say theyâve learned about media and information literacy and have made source evaluation a habitual practice. This finding confirms the success of librariansâ research instruction with students.
Since the rising generation of college students will be the ones to live with the consequences of climate change decisions we make now, knowing their perspective is vital for addressing climate change today. Given that many feel overwhelmed by anxiety and despair, we must figure out how to transform their concerns and fears into a sense that we are not doomed and that collective action is still possible and desperately needed.
The snapshot of our survey about how college students respond to climate change tells us they have devoted considerably more attention to thinking about climate change than their counterparts in the general population have. Higher education faculty and administrators have a critical role to play in helping students gain a sense of agency as we confront a global climate challenge.
The classroom may be the best place for faculty to start. Class discussions about climate change news can help students see connections between their news practices and their academic work, while showing that familiarity with news is a social practice and a form of civic engagement. Several studies in the social sciences and sciences have shown discussions like these can build critical thinking and disciplinary knowledge.
There is still much work to be done to help students translate climate anxiety into shared action. But as one student wrote: âItâs very easy to feel hopeless about a situation you donât directly have control over, but progress always starts from the bottom.â
