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Despite being among the largest concerns for young people, climate change features very little in college textbooks – especially where solutions are concerned.
Given it’s a problem we’ve essentially inherited, our generation is more concerned with climate change than any demographic before us.
Despite this sad disposition, however, it appears educational institutions aren’t quite reflecting the severity of crisis we face within their teachings – especially where finding solutions are concerned.
In-fact, fewer than three pages in a typical 1,000 page biology textbook address climate change as a subject at all, according to a recent analysis of US educational material in the open access journal Plos One.
You may be surprised to hear that this is actually an improvement on past decades, with sentences on the topic expanding from an average of around 51 in the 2000s, to 67 in biology textbooks used for the national curriculum today.
The researchers analysed a total of 57 US biology textbooks published between 1970 and 2019.
Climate change coverage expanded between the 1970s and the 1990s – at which point word-count for solutions actually peaked. In the decades since, data shows that emphasis on ecological issues has declined by 80%, and that available information is slowly migrating further back in the books.
