Advice for Young People Entering the Climate Change Field

A UC Davis undergrad taking a community and regional development class contacted me to talk about my career in the climate change field. One of her questions was:

If you were meeting someone entering into the same field of work as you do, what advice would you give them?

So I started a jot list and ran it past some colleagues working on different levels in the climate change field (or adjacent to it) to get their input. Here's what we devised:

Photo by pixellaphoto (CC0 1.0)

1. Find a Niche

- Narrow your focus - Climate change is a "wicked" problem, meaning a problem that is complex and intractable, having multiple intersecting impacts across many fields that require coordination to address. I call it an "everything" problem, since there is almost no field that it doesn't touch. Because of the sprawling nature of the problem, it's important to figure out what impact or aspect of the problem you are most passionate about and follow that passion.

- Consider internships and graduate programs to help you hone your focus. A lot of natural resource management (and related long-term climate planning) is done by government agencies, so consider interning there. Even if you want to go into consulting eventually, you will be more marketable as a consultant with government contacts. On-the-job training programs like CivicSpark or the California Climate Action Corps (AmeriCorps programs) might be good options to get your foot in the door in local government. State agencies are filling in positions with student interns during a time of budget shortfalls. Check out the California Department of Water Resources Student Employment Program and State Water Boards Student Programs, for example. In terms of the federal government, at the moment that is a tricky place to work on climate issues, but the workforce attrition there might mean there are more opportunities for interns to try to pick up the slack. It might be interesting to check out the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) hub at Sacramento State (which I'm told takes UC Davis students). Check out the "Pathways" internships at USAjobs.gov to find USGS opportunities (here is the USGS web page about its "Pathways" opportunities).

- Become a subject matter expert (SME)! In governmental contexts it can take relatively little to become a SME. Especially as part of a policy support team for an elected official, having read a few articles on a subject can make you functionally a SME. 

2. Network

- Push yourself outside your comfort zone to network. "Cold call" (or cold email) someone in your alumni network doing interesting work. If you might want to work in politics or policy, reach out to the environment desk staffer in your congressional representative's office to find out how they got into that position. Contact a researcher who is taking an innovative approach. Ask all of them "who else should I talk to?"

- Find mentors and peer support. Schedule regular check-ins (monthly or quarterly) as you go through the job search process. Ask them to review cover letters and other application materials for you.

- Support your professional friends! Go to their presentations at conferences. Offer to proofread cover letters and application materials. Send them congratulations when they get a new position. Introduce them to contacts who might be helpful. Tell them about interesting new opportunities. We all build each other up!

- LinkedIn - update your profile before every big networking event and connect with the people you meet at the event right afterward (and if possible send a note with the request to connect that says "it was nice talking to you at [name of event]! People get a lot of requests and it might take them a month to see your request, so jog their memory).

- Professional networks - these are groups committed to trying to bring new people into their field of focus. For all of these groups, if you see something they are organizing that you want to attend, you should contact them -- I'm sure they will find ways for you to plug in without requiring you to pay dues (like having you work the registration table at an event).

American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP)

National Association of Environmental Professionals (NAEP)

• California Association of Environmental Professionals (California AEP)

For non-male-identified folks:

Women’s Environmental Network (WEN) of the San Francisco Bay Area

Association of Women in Water, Energy and Environment (AWWEE)

3. Keep Learning

- Climate change is a problem that is constantly evolving, so it's important to keep expanding your understanding and stay on top of current events in the field. Go to conferences and workshops. Take a community college class on something you don't understand well. I took a community college course on ocean dynamics ("Intro. to the Marine Environment") and it has helped me understand some of the scientific fundamentals of the climate challenge and the importance of quality data, for example getting current data on conditions using satellites and high-tech aircraft. If you are interested in sea level rise, go learn about erosion processes. If you are interested in wildfire, learn fire science (for example, watch some of the presentations on the California Fire Science Consortium YouTube channel).

- Social media - subscribe to some of the climate-related feeds on BlueSky. A lot of the scientific and science communication community I previously followed on Xwitter moved to BlueSky and it is a great way to stay on top of topical news. I would recommend sticking to the science-oriented feeds and sidestepping the activism-oriented feeds (just because you can get that information in many places on social media, whereas BlueSky has become a refuge for the academic community and I don't know where else on social media to find that information).

- Cultivate side interests. You never know where those might lead!

- Some useful things to study that are not climate change-specific:

• Statistics and survey methods (so you can read news reports critically)
• Long-term planning tools that manage deep uncertainty like the participatory scenario planning tool (can help you find a "least regrets" approach, such as when interacting a climate-specific parameter on one axis with a sociopolitical parameter on the other axis - read about a participatory scenario planning workshop I ran with natural resource managers in 2011)
• GIS mapping (to tell the story of a policy problem visually)
• Unconscious bias and behavioral economics (so you can market policies in an inclusive and effective way)

4. Take Care of Your Mental Health

- In this field the tools are not right-sized to the problem. You will always be dancing with feelings of anxiety, despair and grief as you progress in your understanding. Don't do it alone: find your peers dealing with similar feelings and take solace in community.

- Find small things to do that make you feel like you are contributing to the solution on a daily basis, even as small as composting or using more environmentally friendly cleaning products in your kitchen. Go meat-free one day a week. All of these little steps would make a huge difference if everyone did them, and that's a reason to model those steps for your social group. Remember that the most important thing to do to change our climate future is to vote for leaders who listen to science and take action to address climate impacts. Being a "Get Out the Vote" volunteer is a climate action. Do things to remind you that you are part of a movement. 

All Hands On Deck!

A certain amount of global warming is locked in because of how the ocean acts as heat storage, so we can't "stop" climate change," but we can all contribute to a better future in a changed climate. It's all hands on deck, so I hope these tips help you find your way down the climate career pathway.

"Just Like Me" - Connecting Students for Climate Resilience

National Public Radio (NPR) has a new special series "Stress Less" that this week focuses on climate anxiety in college students and exercises that professors developed to help them cope, described in the episode titled "Here's how to turn climate change anxiety into action." It looks like this episode might be the inaugural episode of the series. The journalist behind it is Allison Aubrey, from the food & health beat.

The story talks about a UC Santa Barbara student studying a coral reef only to come back a year later and find it apparently dead. This is a story I've heard before coming from career scientists studying reefs, glaciers, endangered species, and other natural resources that don't stand much of a chance in the face of climate change: finding out the thing you study (and consequently love) might be unable to survive climate change creates climate anxiety. In response to this, the University of California created a curriculum called Climate Resilience, co-directed by Drs. Jyoti Mishra of UCSD, Elissa Epel of UCSF (of the UCSF Center for Climate, Health and Equity's Mental Health Initiative), and Philippe Goldin of UCD. It looks like the course was launched in spring 2024. I was struck how "Just Like Me," one of the class exercises described in the NPR story, sounds a lot like the loving-kindness meditation ("metta") practiced by Buddhists, where you picture people you know and people you don't know - all individuals with whom you have different kinds of relationships - and send them good will. In "Just Like Me," students sit in pairs and try to imagine the other person as a baby, as a child, as someone who has gone through pain and joy the same as they have. The meditation ends with "I know you want to be happy, just like me."

In addition to being reminded of the Buddhist mettta practice, this meditation reminds me of the Transformational Resilience framework, which describes the two things necessary for resilience as "presencing" and "purposing," the first necessary to feel OK in your body, to manage cortisol, and the other to feel connected to a larger collective purpose. The "Just Like Me" meditation seems intended to build both a sense of well-being and connection.

We can't slow climate change through stress reduction, but techniques like these can help students not lose hope on the path forward into a climate-changed future. The student described in the story as feeling hopeless facing the degraded state of the coral reef she had studied, Jada Alexander, graduated and created a San Diego-based initiative to foster environmental stewardship among children and adults through yoga and surfing, Daybreak Beach Club, "Connecting to Nature, Healing Through the Ocean."

Climate Change Communication Resources for Teachers

Yesterday I was marching in the Women's March Oakland with a friend who teaches 4th grade in a local public school, and found out she was in the middle of starting a unit on climate change. My ears pricked up and I started rattling off resources she might want to check out while she scrambled for her smart phone to jot things down in the drizzle. It occurred to me just now that it might be more convenient if I just put up a blog post with my favorite climate change teaching resources available for free online.

"What is Climate Change" in under 6 minutes

First, the Consensus of Evidence summary description of climate change from the free online course Denial101x Week 1 is the best, most concise presentation I've found on the subject.

Concepts you might want to cover/review before watching this video with kids:

• Climate - as something that covers more than just weather, not measured in hours/days but decades/centuries
• Evidence - fancy word for "facts"
• Atmosphere - that it has a structure above the earth's surface, with upper and lower layers
• Infrared radiation - fancy words for "heat"
• Satellites - what are they, what do they do
• Internal variability - how things change within the usual cycle
• Why we use the word greenhouse to describe climate changing gases
• Climate models show us the results of math that predicts the future, they don't describe past observations, but their math is based on past observations (you might want to mention the phrase oft-repeated by climate modelers: "All models are wrong but some are useful")

For audiences not accustomed to hearing an Australian accent you might want to turn on the closed captions (click on the "CC" glyph at the bottom of the video window).

See all the excellent "Denial101x" resources listed in order in a helpful post by a blogger who advocates for climate science. Otherwise, you have to enroll and click through the module to find what you're looking for.

Denial101x is a free online course (a MOOC- "massive open online course") designed to help people analyze and combat climate change denialism by John Cook, the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, and Bärbel Winkler of Skeptical Science.

Enter the Denial101x MOOC module for the full experience.

Helpful Graphics

XKCD's Timeline of Earth's Average Temperature. Comic #1732 (September 12, 2016), by Randall Munroe. The data used is cited as being from 2012 and 2013. If you love this graphic you might enjoy the "Explain XKCD" wiki entry about it.

The Temperature Spiral by University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins, first shared via Twitter on May 9, 2016, with the description "Spiralling global temperatures from 1850-2016 (full animation)," and since updated. It takes about 20 seconds to run. You might want to pause it and point out the last big swerving loop that represents 2016's record heat.

Or you can just leave it on your screen in an infinite loop. It's very relaxing to watch if you don't think about its ominous implications. Click here for another relaxing-if-you-don't-think-about-it spiral, this one going inward, describing Arctic sea ice loss.

Climate change impacts summarized in 19 haiku: some beautiful watercolors and haiku giving the main take-aways of the 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Summary for Policymakers, by NOAA researcher Gregory C. Johnson. You can poke around the full set of IPCC "Fifth Assessment" reports released in 2013-2014 here. The 32-page Summary for Policymakers can be read here.

Someone made a nice 2:28 Youtube video of the haiku.

After reviewing the main impacts with your kids, you might want to circle back to the last line in the haiku in panel #15:

Repositories of Excellent Materials 

Climate Access - Tips and Tools - Climate Access is a North American climate change communications NGO that has lots of useful resources on its site (although the search feature doesn't seem to be functioning-- you'll have to use Google site search).

- Poking around their site I found a link to a 52-min. video of a webinar on how to engage youth on climate change by the Climate Advocacy Lab, and the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE). The webinar is more geared toward people planning education campaigns than teachers facing down a couple dozen bored teenagers in a classroom, but it does provide interesting public survey data on how teens are accessing information. They present an analysis of ACE's Get Loud Challenge, now called Power Forward.

The Alliance for Climate Education has a 45 min. presentation for high school students featuring the video "Our Climate Our Future" - available for cheap ($5 for 2 days' access) here. You can see the first 8:30 of the full presentation as it was given at the White House in 2015 here.

The Climate Literacy and Awareness Network (CLEAN) has 650+ middle and high school lesson plans free online.

Climate Central - simply the best source for well-written/presented pieces on current climate science. Its content is not necessarily for the younger set, but is generally designed to be accessible.

Two Climate Central articles you might check out before teaching a curriculum on climate change:

- "Should We Tell the Whole Truth About Climate Change?" - an opinion piece by one of their senior science writers

- "Think You’re a Climate Whiz? Take the Quiz" - a 12-part multiple choice quiz. Note that it was written in 2014, so the question "What was the warmest year on record for the globe?" might need a 2016 correction. NASA and NOAA agree 2016 was the warmest year on record globally (NASA).

Games

Game of Floods - See if this award-winning game taking on the challenge of planning for sea level rise might work for your kids. You could probably get tips for how to adapt it for different age groups from one of the creators, the county's Planning Manager Jack Liebster, at +1 (415) 473-4331 or jliebster -at- co.marin.ca.us.

- UPDATE - I just ran into Jack at a conference and he said they have used Game of Floods in a classroom context as part of the "Youth Exploring Sea Level Rise Science" (YESS) project, a SF Bay Area curriculum.

The Grid - if you've got an Amazon gift card to burn, this is a fabulous board game that lets the players make their own conclusions about the relative benefits of different energy sources.

The U.S. EPA's game "Generate" - Free! Download it while you still can! It was launched in May 2016 as a teaching tool for classrooms- it looks like a more instructional version of The Grid.

Things You Can Do 

The BioBlitz - an event idea created by National Geographic where you try to document as many species as possible in a given place within a short period of time. The U.S. NPS has a page dedicated to BioBlitzes in the National Parks - including a map where you can click to see what parks near you are involved. The NPS works with iNaturalist, which puts together apps to help document nature. Check out the totals from the Golden Gate National Recreation Area's April 1, 2016, BioBlitz on iNaturalist here. If we don't measure biodiversity we can't measure how it shifts with climate change.

The National Phenology Network's "Nature's Notebook" program - where you sign up to be an "observer" and report on changes in plants and animals around you. Check out their Nature's Notebook curriculum and activities page. The data collected here is actually used by scientists! The NPN has documented earlier springtime leafing-out and blooming dates for keystone plant species, shifts linked to climate change. The more we know about these shifts, the better we can prepare.

Rain gardens - the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network (SPAWN), based in Marin County, did a great project with the Marin Municipal Water District called "10,000 Rain Gardens" - here's their 2010 report on the project. Although the project is long-finished, MMWD staff are continuing to support community rain gardens - see their resources here. Slowing, spreading, and sinking rainwater helps protect wildlife habitats, reduces hazardous flooding, and recharges groundwater, all helpful under conditions of climate change. From the Rain Garden Network - 10 steps to creating your own rain garden.

Plant native plants to help endangered butterflies - Here in California the California Native Plant Society provides resources for schools that want to plant native plants to support our endangered butterflies and other pollinators. Changes in climate are threatening already endangered species and moving other otherwise healthy wildlife populations toward endangerment. Every little bit of native plant gardening helps maintain sources of food and habitat for our most vulnerable creatures.

ACE's Power Forward - a youth-oriented campaign for clean energy. It recruits 13-24 year-olds to engage in their interactive digital platform through which "participants are able to seamlessly share national climate content on social media and get updates about opportunities to attend local actions in person."