07-02-2024
There’s a new degree in higher education.
In response to rising student demand, many universities across the country have begun offering degrees focused specifically on addressing climate change, alongside existing degrees in subjects like environmental science and policy.
Although there are clear overlaps, these new degrees are unique in their interdisciplinary focus. The programs emphasize real-world climate solutions and developments, challenging the notion of the university as an ivory tower and rethinking the role of undergraduate higher education.
As combating the climate crisis becomes more imperative, students with strengths in every discipline will need to play a role. At the University of Montana, the climate change studies minor is designed to complement various programs, with students coming from 20 to 25 majors each year. The courses cover everything from ecosystems to global economics to literature—all with a focus on climate change. The idea is to push students out of their comfort zones and encourage engagement with peers from different programs across campus.
“We want as wide a spectrum as we can get, to really approach the question of how society responds to crisis,” says Peter McDonough, director of the climate change studies program at the University of Montana.
Columbia University offers a climate systems science major, launched in September 2023. It is also highly interdisciplinary, requiring courses on environmental science, natural science, climate systems, and policy or communications. Joerg Schaefer, the director of undergraduate studies who developed this major, says Columbia is expanding its offerings. A climate and sustainability major, focusing more on real-world applications, will be available starting September 2024, and an engineering-focused climate physics and chemistry major is planned for September 2025.
Both programs emphasize teaching students how to combat climate change, offering “solutions courses” that explore why solving the climate crisis is so difficult despite many known solutions. The courses aim to prepare students to address these problems regardless of their career paths.
McDonough notes that students often struggle to understand how their skills and interests fit into the larger fight against the climate crisis, both personally and professionally.
“We want to help students figure out what’s the next easiest thing for you to do?” McDonough says. “For some people, that’s going to be activism and getting involved legislatively. For others, it’s going to be a dietary change or having climate conversations with family members who are climate deniers.”
Montana’s climate change minor also requires an internship or capstone project, ranging from working on a local farm to assisting a documentary filmmaker or interning with senators in Washington, D.C., or think tanks in New York City. “What we really need students to do is take a climate awareness with them, whatever career they pursue,” McDonough says.
He cites two former students who graduated from Montana with journalism majors and climate change studies minors. During the 2021 Northwest heat dome that caused an estimated 1,400 deaths, two local news outlets in Missoula assigned these former students to report on the crisis. Their program-acquired knowledge enabled them to write more informed stories and collaborate with the local climate office to explain how the heat wave was caused by climate change.
“So all the news coming out of Missoula about the heat dome had a climate element,” McDonough says. “Anyone reading that got a little extra education about how climate change works.”
Although climate change isn’t a specific industry, the job market has exploded for graduates with climate science educations.
“There are a variety of companies regularly interested in our climate science students at Columbia,” Schaefer says. “The most prominent are insurance companies and Wall Street firms. All of them now have climate experts in their workforce.” The need for new solutions in the property insurance industry has become particularly pressing as climate risks have become so high that it’s challenging to keep both residents protected and insurance businesses afloat.
Despite being around for only two years, climate systems science at Columbia has become a highly attractive major. Schaefer says demand is so high that the school will soon struggle to offer enough classes—an uncommon issue at a well-resourced institution like Columbia.
Although finance remains the most popular career option for Columbia climate majors, Schaefer notes two other fast-growing fields: climate justice and climate communications. Climate justice focuses on how climate change disproportionately impacts marginalized populations and seeks solutions that don’t exacerbate current inequities. Climate communications aim to bridge the gap between climate scientists advocating for change and the politicians, industry leaders, and the broader public who can enact it.
At Montana, where the causes and effects of climate change are tangible due to wildfires and unsustainable state energy policy, McDonough has seen a significant increase in students interested in the mental health aspects of tackling the crisis.
“My first semester on the job, I had a student attempt suicide because climate change had become such a traumatic thing for her that she couldn’t picture a way forward anymore,” he says. “Thankfully, she didn’t succeed and is now actually working in the field. But that lit a fire under me.”
Montana now offers an undergraduate honors class called Climate Change, Mental Health, and Resilience, and a graduate psychology course called Psychology and Climate Change. The mental health lens is also integrated into its compulsory introductory course.
As schools move towards embracing the psychological and ethical aspects of climate change, McDonough anticipates some backlash from more conservative school administrators.
“The program is growing slowly… because we’re in a very red state that tries to quash any efforts to address climate change,” he says. “Our sister university, Montana State University, has actively demoted and fired faculty for teaching about climate change and forced PhD students to change their theses… There’s a little bit of very understandable fear at the school administration level in states like Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.”
Despite this, McDonough remains optimistic.
“This generation of college students is so much more savvy about climate than my generation or previous generations ever were,” he says. “The momentum is clearly in favor of strong climate change programs.”