Cultivating environmental health literacy to empower urban and rural youth to contribute to climate resilience efforts in their communities

Abstract:

Cultivating climate literacy among youth positions them to develop solutions and advocate for actions that prepare communities to adapt to climate change, mitigate emissions and ultimately protect human health. This presentation will describe an NSF-funded informal STEM education program designed to promote environmental health literacy in the context of climate change and encourage youth to participate in action projects that build resilience in the face of extreme weather events and other climate-related impacts. Youth Engaging in the Science of Resilience in Urban and Rural NC (YES-Resilience) Teen Climate Ambassadors (TCA) Program is a collaboration between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute for the Environment and the North Carolina (NC) Museum of Natural Sciences. With museum locations in Raleigh and Whiteville, NC, this program engages high school aged youth from groups underrepresented in STEM, including females, minorities, and youth from rural communities. Programming is informed by the steps to resilience outlined in the US Climate Resilience Toolkit; this session will feature the strategies, STEM-based activities and resources used to engage youth in exploring local and regional climate impacts, examining vulnerabilities and risks, investigating relevant mitigation and adaptation strategies and building a community’s resilience to climate impacts through completion of an action project. This work will culminate in the development of an environmental health-focused climate resilience curriculum for informal science learning environments. Ultimately, this program will provide insight into how rural and urban youth, including those who identify as belonging to groups underrepresented in STEM careers, respond to programming on climate resilience and suggest strategies for increasing the relevance of programming in both rural and urban areas. In addition to sharing program evaluation data, we’ll describe efforts to assess environmental health literacy of participants, as evidenced by their: (a) understanding of climate change and community resilience, (b) development of analytical skills and self-efficacy associated with implementing local solutions to address climate impacts, and (c) participation in resilience-focused actions in their communities.