Climate Change Impacts Kids. It’s Time We Educate Them about It.

Our education system is meant to prepare our country’s youth for the lives ahead of them, but a crucial area of study has been all but forgotten in the curriculum: the world around us, in its most tangible, immediate, and visceral terms. If we as a nation taught kids how to read the environment in which they live their lives—the air they breathe, the changes in weather, the taste of food they eat and the water they drink—what would they tell us that they perceive?

Equipped with the critical tools, I doubt many children would deny that something has gone very, very wrong.

More conceptual approaches to science of course bear this out: to cite just one metric, experts report that governments are failing to keep the global temperature rise under the crucial 1.5°C threshold, risking irreversible environmental impacts and more frequent disasters. And yet New York State is neither comprehensively equipping youth to understand climate change nor empowering them to be part of solving it. Moreover, youth in low-income, racially marginalized communities, are, oftentimes, disproportionately impacted by climate change due to systemic racial biases in policymaking and law enforcement, a structural trend known as Environmental Racism.

Because of Environmental Racism, communities of color face the fallout of climate disaster and environmental degradation most acutely. Therefore, youth growing up in communities plagued by environmental injustice are doubly impacted, as they have the most at stake and are being deprived of the necessary tools, skills, and resources to effectively tackle climate change issues. Despite this, their backgrounds make them uniquely positioned to both understand the pressing complexities of our rapidly changing world and shape a sustainable and equitable future for themselves and future generations.

Environmental Racism is a grim reality in the primarily Black and Latinx working and middle-class neighborhoods in California and New York where I have lived and worked my whole life. In places like Crenshaw, Los Angeles and East Flatbush, Brooklyn, I’ve witnessed first-hand the normalization of such racism not only in the sense of it being ever-present, but also in the sense that those forced to live under its thumb have come to accept it as normal, having been abandoned by the governmental agencies and institutions who neglect to address it. This situation mirrors broader societal challenges, where institutions often neglect the pressing needs of the most vulnerable, leaving communities to fend for themselves against systemic barriers.

In my work at Next100, I will be addressing this disconnect, ensuring that no youth—especially youth growing up in communities plagued by environmental injustice in New York State—feels ill-equipped to understand and fight for a better, more equitable world. In this commentary, I’ll share with you stories from my own experience growing up and as a teacher, and illustrate the ways in which New York State could become a template for a paradigm shift in climate change education across the country.

Remembrance and Realization

During the summer of my sixth birthday, on the outskirts of Crenshaw, California, I kicked around soccer balls to the whistles of our coach and the droning hum of pumpjacks drilling into the Earth’s ancient oil reservoirs. On the way to school every day, I imagined those very pump jacks to be dinosaurs stomping on the backdrop of an industrial Jurassic Park.

It wasn’t until I moved from my quieter childhood neighborhood of Crenshaw in Los Angeles, California to the bustling streets of East Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York for college that I truly began to understand the impact of Environmental Racism on my life. Some days, as I walk through East Flatbush to the apartment that my father’s family has resided in since they immigrated from Jamaica four decades ago, I am acutely aware of the stakes: there are 153,000 people here in this neighborhood playing with their kids, cooking meals for their parents, and waiting for their grandchildren to visit them, all on top of the Metropolitan Natural Gas Reliability Project. Colloquially known as the North Brooklyn Pipeline, this pipeline remains a silent menace threatening to jeopardize sixty-three schools, eighty-one daycares, nine hospitals, and three nursing homes, not if, but when it leaks.

In the fall of 2019, I co-created the initiative that would become Start:Empowerment, an Environmental Justice Education nonprofit with programming in the Bronx, which has touched the lives of over 3,700 students to date. In the process, I realized how similar the impacts of Environmental Racism are, regardless of the many differences between East Flatbush and Crenshaw. Why do both the majority of the classmates I grew up with and my current students have asthma, experience heat stroke, live with food insecurity, or wrestle with the aftermath of floods, air pollution, water toxicity, or chemical leaches in their homes? Why has practically nothing changed between then and now?

Why do both the majority of the classmates I grew up with and my current students have asthma, experience heat stroke, live with food insecurity, or wrestle with the aftermath of floods, air pollution, water toxicity, or chemical leaches in their homes? Why has practically nothing changed between then and now?

Once I started asking these questions, everything from the unnecessary intrusion of a gas pipeline to the barren streets devoid of greenery began to fit a pattern. Particularly, there is a disregard for low-income communities, often communities of color, through disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards, pollutants, and toxic waste—textbook environmental injustice.

Environmental Racism in Context

It is important to consider that these consequences are not just due to pipelines or urban planning oversights; rather, they are the result of deliberate action taken by profiteers to the detriment of communities like mine. In fact, it is well-documented that some of the most polluted environments in America are places that people of color have lived for generations, and continue to live, work, play, and pray. This is not only my reality—my normal—but also the case for countless others.

Dr. Robert D. Bullard, a researcher known as the father of Environmental Justice, wrote alongside other Environmental Justice giants Paul Mohia, Robin Saha, and Beverly Wright in 2000 that, on average, people of color constitute 56 percent of the population in neighborhoods within three kilometers of toxic release inventory (TRI) facilities—which manage the waste of certain toxic chemicals that pose a threat to human health and the environment— whereas only 30 percent are white. A 2021 study expands upon this trend and brings it into the present day, finding that people of color in the United States are exposed to higher levels of air pollution than white people across most sources of emissions, a finding that was consistent across states and income levels, and in both rural and urban areas.

The Case for Critical Climate Change Education

How can we ensure that the kids most affected by these conditions understand what is happening around them? It’s true that some amount of environmental or climate science is incorporated into many K–12 curricula, but even when the disciplines are offered to young people, the coursework lacks the analytical tools necessary to apply the core scientific principles to their inequitable lived experiences. In my work prior to joining Next100, I worked through the lens of critical climate change education (CCCE) to address just this disconnect.

At Start:Empowerment, my teammates and I were able to hone our understanding of climate change education iteratively through work with students in the Bronx. This meant helping students and communities connect the complex nature of the natural and the built environments they occupy to terms and concepts that frame the complex relations of their surroundings. For example, we guided students through investigating the issue of food insecurity by learning the role that redlining, racial segregation, and urban planning plays in the creation of food deserts, and taught them how to use basic research methods to look at New York City data according to zip code and self-reflect on the impact this has on their family’s diet and behaviors.

This approach built off of the status quo in environmental education, which fails to cover more systemic issues facing students. Where traditional climate change education tends to emphasize the greenhouse gas effect, the holes in our ozone layer, and/or focus on individual actions students can take, usually in relation to reducing one’s carbon footprint, CCCE covers this and more by weaving in an interdependent, systemic approach. CCCE achieves this first by helping students understand the ways in which their classes, cultures, and identities exist within the current social, political, and economic hegemony, then by showing them how those structures shape both their and others’ choices and actions. The end-goal is to enhance their civic understanding, to empower students to speak up, take action, and create change.

My Start:Empowerment teammates and I were able to bring about a closer link between what was discussed in the classroom and real life, building the program’s activities around the environmental problems that are faced by our students’ own communities and focusing analyses of those problems by means of an interdisciplinary, comprehensive approach. Because of this, students were able to grasp not only how issues plaguing their communities affected themselves, their families, their neighbors, and their fellow students, but also learned how to connect these observations and experiences with global climate change trends.

And, it was there in the Bronx, a borough known for its severe environmental injustice—for its increased climate change risk with regard to extreme heat projections and pollution exposures based on vehicle traffic density, as well as for the ongoing removal and displacement of communities of color due to racist urban planning projects such as the placement of the Cross-Bronx Expressway—that I also realized that this type of education was not made readily available to everyone.

Students in New York City public schools receive just two hours of climate-related instruction in a core or credit-bearing class on average each year.

That is why New York not only needs climate change education but Critical Climate Change Education. In 2019, New York State passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which calls for widespread community leadership in greening the state, and yet students in New York City public schools receive just two hours of climate-related instruction in a core or credit-bearing class on average each year. Furthermore, there is no standardized way of measuring whether students actually receive climate-related instruction on the state level, let alone CCCE.

New York needs to bring up kids as the workers, activists, advocates, artists and organizers of tomorrow. I saw one example of CCCE producing such an advocate very recently, in my work at Start:Empowerment with an intrepid high school student named Dani.

Dani’s Story

In the summer heat of New York, Daniella “Dani” Sánchez-Barillas, a 17-year-old rising senior at BASIS Independent High School, found herself grappling with an issue close to home and heart. Dani, proud of her Costa Rican heritage, grew up amidst the fragrant aromas of gallo pinto and picadillo de papa, dishes her family lovingly prepared. Yet, the sight of uneaten meals and fresh produce thrown away both at home and school troubled her deeply.

This concern coincided with her involvement in Start:Empowerment’s Summer School program. This six-week program consisted of virtual foundational courses covering topics from household toxics and climate change-related public health hazards to grassroots policy advocacy and community organizing 101 classes curated by Black, Indigenous, and POC organizers, including myself, who were already fighting for Environmental Justice in their own communities. Before, Dani had learned about climate change mostly through social media; now, she had access to discussion-based lectures, workshops, and a resource network fostering intergenerational connections with other action-oriented community members.

As a result of Summer School, Dani was able to see how waste paralleled neglect in her community and made use of a microgrant provided by Start:Empowerment to propel herself into action. She spearheaded a campaign to combat food waste at her school, redirecting food waste from the cafeteria by composting it or donating it to a local food pantry in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Through Start:Empowerment’s CCCE curriculum, Dani delved into the complexities of climate change, exploring its intersections with race, ethnicity, and urban planning. The predominantly white neighborhood where she attended school contrasted sharply with nearby areas. Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, wealthy neighborhoods in Brooklyn, boasted nearly double the number of supermarkets per capita compared to the predominantly Black neighborhoods of Crown Heights North and Prospect Heights (12:1 vs. 25:1) and required less than half of the meals needed per year for food security (2,155,509 vs. 5,898,863). These disparities put in stark relief the urban policies that perpetuate food deserts, which adversely affect communities of color’s health and well-being.

Fuelled by these insights and an emphasis on community-based systems-change within the CCCE curriculum, Dani expanded her vision from individually composting her classmates’ food scraps to establishing a comprehensive, school-wide composting and food rescue operation. Through Start:Empowerment, she developed skills in community engagement and strategic planning, as well as receiving mentorship from myself that enabled her to forge partnerships with local food pantries and navigate school administrative channels. Her initiative swiftly took shape as she mobilized the twenty-student Eco Club she had started and organized mini-educational sessions at school to raise awareness about food justice and waste. Dani taught her peers how to distinguish between compostable and donatable food, and encouraged them to volunteer in the food rescue program.

Dani’s efforts bore fruit—literally and figuratively. The program successfully redirected ten tons of food waste to a third-party composter, and rescued forty meals per day for the Red Hook Food Pantry. Moreover, her initiative ignited more students into environmental action and nurtured a community dedicated to sustainability through the food rescue programs, which are still operating to this day. Through her journey, Dani not only transformed her school’s approach to food waste, but also embodied the change she wished to see, inspiring her community to embrace sustainability and justice in every bite and every action.

The Horizon

Luckily for New Yorkers like Dani, CCCE advocates and organizers have already laid the groundwork for CCCE to become a core part of the state’s curriculum. In fact, New York State already has a number of laws and policies in place that promote long-term sustainability and a fair and equitable transition to renewable energy systems, using education as a tool with which to further these goals. From New York State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which calls for the “creation of new offices and task forces to address climate change” with an understanding that “action undertaken by New York to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will have an impact on…the rate of climate change;” to the 2023 New York City “PlaNYC: Getting Sustainability Done” report released by the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, which calls for the building of the Green Economic Engine by way of “Launch[ing] new climate education and training programs for public schools,” CCCE has a foothold, and we must take advantage of these crucial opportunities to bring a climate-ready generation online.

Luckily for New Yorkers like Dani, CCCE advocates and organizers have already laid the groundwork for CCCE to become a core part of the state’s curriculum.

An initiative directly focused on climate change education is the Climate and Resilience Education Task Force (CRETF), which is composed of over 400 educators, students and professionals—including myself—as well as over sixty-five organizations and entities, which collectively reach thousands within the education space and have come together to champion policy change at the New York State level. The task force sees education policy as a vehicle to fulfill the demands of legislation like the CLCPA, which calls for an aggressive and essential commitment to 100-percent zero-emission electricity by 2040 in New York State. In order to do so, we at CRETF believe it is critical for New York State to build a culture of preparedness by educating its young citizens about the scientific, social, cultural, economic, and political implications of the climate crisis. This must include teaching about the disproportionate effects of the crisis on New York’s most marginalized communities, who are also the ones most harmed by environmental degradation. If the state commits to carrying this torch, it could provide a model that the rest of the nation could follow.

Climate change impacts everyone. It’s time we as a nation do something about it.

Climate change impacts everyone. It’s time we as a nation do something about it. Implementing Critical Climate Change Education, which acknowledges and validates students’ lived experiences and empowers them to create change themselves, is crucial in this effort. For youth like me and across New York State, climate preparedness is not a “nice to have” but an essential, because our future depends on it. That is why in an upcoming commentary, I’ll take us inside a classroom where we can see the benefits of CCCE in action. And, stay tuned for more from me over the next two years, as I focus not only on New York State but also on other state-based frameworks for climate change education, like in New Jersey and California, to create a widely applicable model for weaving in opportunities for CCCE in action.

I invite you to follow my policy journey at Next100 here, the on-the-ground work of Start:Empowerment here, and the legislative work of the Climate and Resilience Education Task Force here.

Image Credit: Zenobia St Clair