Students, Schools, and Our Climate Moment: Acting Now to Secure Our Future

A call to action that promotes K-12 schools and students as key contributors to climate solutions

Laura A. Schifter and Jonathan Klein highlight the many ways in which K-12 schools and students have tremendous potential to advance solutions on environmental issues, and they provide frameworks for enacting change, in Students, Schools, and Our Climate Moment. Schifter and Klein demonstrate how the effects of climate change intersect with US public schools on multiple levels--for example, schools must prepare students to face the challenges of an uncertain future, accommodate disruptions brought about by extreme weather conditions, and evaluate their systems’ energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Through rousing case studies of climate efforts in schools across the United States, Schifter and Klein show what it means to center children and young people in climate solutions and illustrate how educators and institutions can take comprehensive action. They share step-by-step plans for applying the lessons of these situations to future action, rooting their frameworks in the climate action plan of the Aspen Institute’s K12 Climate Action Commission and the Coherence Framework developed by the Public Education Leadership Project at Harvard University.

The tools and key takeaways offered here can help raise climate literacy among students and also foster a climate collaboration mindset within districts, inspire community mobilization toward equity and sustainability, and enact policy change to shift society and mitigate the climate crisis.

Laura A. Schifter is a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute, where she founded and directs This Is Planet Ed, an initiative to unlock the power of education as a force for climate action. She is also a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and serves on the Committee on Climate Education at Harvard University. Jonathan Klein is cofounder and CEO of UndauntedK12, which works to support America’s public schools to make an equitable transition to zero carbon emissions while preparing youth to build a sustainable future in a rapidly changing climate. His work at UndauntedK12 has been recognized with a fellowship from the Emerson Collective and the McNulty Catalyst Prize.