Infusing the Psychology of Climate Change into Environmental Curricula

Abstract

Undergraduate and graduate programs in natural resource management focus on interventions to sustainably manage wildlife, fisheries, and forests. Coursework usually provides in-depth content on the biology and ecology of species and ecosystems. Topics such as climate change are framed as environmental problems, and risks and impacts to the natural world are emphasized. Relatively few courses incorporate concepts from psychology, or more specifically ecopsychology, to present an underlying framework to help students understand the basis of why people's individual and collective actions may reflect denial, exacerbation, or problem-solving solutions to environmental hazards such as climate change. Incorporating a psychological approach into students' exploration of climate change issues provides the basis for learning about climate change risks and impacts in the context of daily life, communication in mass media, and in policy formation. Incorporating a psychological approach can improve the effectiveness of teaching concepts of climate change in natural resource and environmental science classes. We describe how models and concepts from psychological fields were integrated into coursework for advanced undergraduate and graduate natural resource students. We describe specific examples using a pedagogical framework for helping learners to engage, explore, explain, and elaborate the psychology behind climate change actions. This approach should better prepare students with an understanding that ecological knowledge must be integrated with solutions that address psychological barriers if efforts to alter behavior related to climate change are to succeed.