As the impacts of climate change become increasingly devastating, they will also become increasingly inequitable. Already, much of the burden of climate change is felt by people and nations that were low historical emitters while extreme historical emitters avoid the direst consequences. Thus, it is vital that we implement justice and equity into our strategies to understand, mitigate, and adapt to climate change. To ensure these considerations are taken, we must do more than acknowledge the existence of disparity; we must instead commit to making equity, justice, and inclusion a central aspect of how we think about the climate crisis. This requires not just including climate justice in discussions with scientists and policymakers, but in how we teach about climate change to the youth, the very people who will be tasked with surviving and adapting to the worst effects of this crisis.

That is why The Program on Climate Change has been hard at work developing a publicly accessible eBook that addresses this very issue. Climate Justice in Your Classroom: Weaving Climate, Environmental Justice and Civic Engagement into Your Courses is simultaneously a standardized compilation of past University of Washington courses that have included lessons centering climate justice, a guidebook for educators on how they can include climate justice themes in their own lessons, and a living resource for the future that will be updated as more and more courses from across the university begin to include these topics. We hope that this eBook will be a valuable resource, not just for UW professors, but for any educators who wish to implement more elements of justice into their climate curricula.

Much of this book was inspired by the work of Dr. Heather Price (North Seattle College). In the past, Dr. Price has helmed the creation of a Canvas Commons that shares the lessons developed by workshop participants. She was also an original host of the PCC, Program on the Environment, and College of the Environment-backed Climate and Environmental Justice Faculty Institute, an annual workshop that allows UW professors to gain both content and pedagogical experience in service of tuning their course(s) towards inclusion of Climate/Environmental Justice topics, with time for feedback and interaction from the instructors and colleagues. Both of these initiatives were instrumental to the development of this eBook and many of the lessons included are adapted from either the original Canvas Commons or the results of the previous workshops. As these workshops continue to facilitate greater inclusion of justice topics in university courses, this eBook will also expand, creating a more and more robust resource as time goes on.

The PCC and all those who have contributed to the eBook as initial lesson writers (Dr. Alex Turner, Dr. Alexandra Anderson-Frey, Dr. LuAnne Thompson, Dr. Mikelle Nuwer, Dr. Brittany Johnson) and editors (Dr. Miriam Bertram, Dr. Heather Price, Dr. Alex Turner, Madeleine Brooks, and Isaac Olson) are all greatly excited about everything this eBook can do for normalizing and amplifying diverse, just, inclusive, and engaged perspectives in fighting climate change. As these initiatives become normalized, our ability to do our part as a university, a group of scientists, and a steward for the next generation will become increasingly possible. We hope you can join us on this journey.

This post was contributed by Isaac Olson, PCC Undergraduate Assistant. He is studying oceanography and environmental studies to determine how the oceans are changing, how it will affect humans, and what we can do about it! You can reach him at ido77@uw.edu.