Climate Literacy—Imperative Competencies for Tomorrow’s Engineers

Abstract

Engineers must take a leading role in addressing the challenges of mitigating climate change and adapting to the inevitable changes that our world is facing. To improve climate literacy, technical education must include problem formulation and solutions that consider complex interactions between engineered, Earth, and societal systems, including trade-offs among benefits, costs, and risks. Improving engineering students’ climate literacy must also inspire students’ motivation to work toward climate solutions. This paper highlights the content and pedagogical approach used in a class for engineering students that helped contribute to significant gains in engineering students’ climate literacy and critical thinking competencies. A total of 89 students fully participated in a pre/post climate literacy questionnaire over four years of study. As a whole, students demonstrated significant gains in climate-related content knowledge, affect, and behavior. Substantial differences were observed between students in different engineering disciplines and male vs. female students. Assessment of critical thinking showed that students did an excellent job formulating problem statements and solutions in a manner that incorporated a multidimensional systems perspective. These skills are critical for students to address climate change effectively in their eventual professions.