Introduction

The scientific community has made the urgent need to mitigate climate change clear (IPCC, 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c). The international community has formally accepted ambitious mitigation goals through its ratification of the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which states that warming should be limited to “well below” 2 ˚C and efforts should be pursued to hold it to 1.5˚C (UNFCCC, 2015). Yet, a formidable “emissions gap” (Figure 1) remains between the aspirational goals of the Paris Agreement and the real-world pledges and actions of nations that are party to it. Here, it is argued that closing the emissions gap can only be achieved if a similarly wide “education gap” between scientific and societal understanding of climate change is also closed. In other words, addressing climate change effectively will require transfer and use of knowledge—that is education, that enables informed decision making and action at all levels in society. In this context, education encompasses the many ways in which knowledge and skill are transferred from one person to another. This includes formal primary, secondary, tertiary, and adult education; professional development; worker training; and learning through informal means (i.e., through cultural and social experiences).

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Figure 1. CO₂ emissions scenarios (left) and temperature outcomes (right) commensurate with no major climate change mitigation policies (“No policy;” or RCP 8.5), the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) pledged under the Paris Agreement; and limiting warming to 1.5 ˚C above preindustrial times. Emissions trajectories and outcomes were generated with the C-ROADS (Sterman et al., 2012, 2013) climate change policy simulator.

Social science research is also clear: acquiring knowledge about climate change does not necessarily move individuals to action (DeWaters & Powers, 2013; Schultz, Gouveia, Cameron, Tankha, Schmuck, & Franěk, 2005). Affective and social forces often influence risk perception and actions around climate change (e.g., Doherty & Webler, 2016; Kahan et al., 2012; Pidgeon & Fischhoff, 2011; Weber, 2006). Thus, knowledge must be paired with affect, beliefs, intentions, and motivation to enact change (Lombardi & Sinatra, 2012).

Several fundamental aspects of climate change make both the imperative and the opportunity that education offers clear. First, successful mitigation of climate change will require action at all levels of society—from individuals to organizations, local, state, and national governments, and international bodies. Second, in the case of climate change, learning from experience is learning too late. Because of inertia in the climate and human energy systems, decisions and actions have consequences that unfold over decades to centuries or longer. We are privileged to live in a time when science offers rigorously grounded projections of possible outcomes, providing an opportunity to learn from projections, rather than experience. Yet this privilege cannot be realized without translation of that knowledge, through education, into societal action.

Education is also central for achieving broader social goals that are interdependent with climate goals and that balance and integrate across economic, social, and environmental systems (United Nations General Assembly, 2015). These goals include access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all; enabling sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic opportunity; and full and productive employment for all. The crucial role played by education and training is recognized by the UNFCCC, the Paris Climate Change Agreement, and the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.

Organizations, countries, and scientific institutions have made progress on climate change education, training, and international cooperation unrelated to these international agreements and goals. However, it is clear that there is a significant gap between the potential to support and accelerate effective societal responses to climate change challenges and opportunities and domestic and international programs, especially those that strengthen international cooperation to scale up education efforts that are already underway, as described by Article 6 of the UNFCCC (2015; and see Conference of the Parties, 2016).

Here, general themes and several specific examples of effective climate change education efforts are explored. While this article is informed primarily by climate change education and training activities in the United States, examples of international efforts are included (e.g., the World Climate simulation and the GLOBE Program), and the themes discussed are transferable internationally.

Climate Change and Society—The Problem

Taken together, scientific understanding of the causes and potential consequences of climate change provide a clear imperative for a rapid transition to a low carbon economy. Figure 1 contrasts three emissions scenarios and their expected global surface temperature rise over preindustrial times by 2100. These include: (a) no significant policy changes, “business-as-usual” or BAU (IPCC, 2014d), with an expected increase of ~4.5˚C by 2100; (b) the expected outcome of nations’ pledges, or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) to the UNFCCC Paris Agreement (UNFCCC, 2015) with an expected increase of ~3.5 ˚C by 2100 (Kintisch, 2015); and (c) an example of a trajectory expected to limit warming to ~1.5 ˚C. Both the BAU and NDC scenarios are expected to yield harmful consequences for human health, security, agricultural production, infrastructure, and biodiversity loss. For example, impacts expected by 2100 under BAU include a ~60% increase in the frequency of drought across the globe (Prudhomme et al., 2013); a 20% and 50% decline in the production of maize and wheat, respectively, in most of Central and South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and most of southeast Asia (Rosenzweig et al., 2013); and the possibility of multi-meter sea level rise by 2100 (Hansen et al., 2016). Both BAU and NDCs scenarios are likely to lead to mass migration of human populations from the Middle East and North Africa by mid- to late century due to air pollution from windblown desert dust that are expected to surpass human physiological tolerance (Lelieveld, Proestos, Hadjinicolaou, Tanarhte, Tyrlis, & Zittis, 2016). Both scenarios are also expected to lead to committed sea level rise of >13 m (Levermann et al., 2013) and committed warming of ~5˚C or more over centuries to millennia (Solomon et al., 2011). In addition, many climate change impacts are thought to be mediated by threshold processes, in which a small step in warming causes a large increase in risks if those thresholds are passed. Examples include public health impacts (Heal & Park, 2016; Kjellstrom, Briggs, Freyberg, Lemke, Otto, & Hyatt, 2016; USGCRP, 2016) and crop failure (Lesk, Rowhani, & Ramankutty, 2016; Schlenker & Roberts, 2009), which are both mediated by physiological thresholds.

Clearly, it would benefit society if decision makers across sectors learn about climate change impacts and their causes from scientific projections, rather than direct experience, and take action to avoid them. Feasible emissions scenarios that could meet the Paris Agreement goals diverge from the BAU and the NDC pathways within the next few years (e.g., Figure 1), well before the impacts described above are expected to occur. Thus to close the emissions gap, the education gap must also be closed, through the transfer of knowledge from science to society, in ways that address affective, social, and cultural forces that allow the building of the political will, behaviors, and technologies to enable informed emissions decisions.

Similarly, education is vital for climate change adaptation, or reducing vulnerability to impacts that are now inevitable even if emissions targets are met. For example, even if warming is limited to +2˚C by 2100, expected impacts include: upper temperature limits that surpass present-day extremes in many regions (Schleussner et al., 2016); sea level rise before 2100 of ~0.5 m; and committed sea level rise beyond the century to millennial timescales of 2–10 m (Levermann et al., 2013). Reducing vulnerability to inevitable impacts requires changes in infrastructure, policy, and behavior well before the impacts themselves occur. Once again, the role of education is critical in enabling informed decision-making based on projections of potential impacts, rather than relying on experience that will come too late.

In short, for individuals and society to effectively address climate change it is necessary that they have the ability to iteratively and effectively integrate scientific information about climate change into their own societal and cultural context and decision making.

Climate Change Science and Education: A Need to Integrate Across Disciplines

There has long been a desire to connect academic science to real-life situations (Hurd, 1998), not only to capture the interest of students but to enable those students to apply the knowledge and skills they gain to effectively contribute to society. From this is derived the definition of a scientifically literate person as one who can apply their understanding of science and the scientific process to solve problems and address societal issues. However, this transfer of knowledge and skills to practical situations outside of the context in which it is taught is not always achieved (Hurd, 1998). This is despite calls, such as from the U.S. National Science Foundation in 1970, for an increased focus on “the understanding of science and technology by those who are not and do not expect to be professional scientists and technologists” (National Science Foundation, 1970, p. III). The need for the educational system to serve not only future scientists but all citizens is reflected in the numerous science educational frameworks. For example, in the United States, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) states “All students no matter what their future education and career path must have a solid K–12 science education in order to be prepared for college, careers, and citizenship” (NGSS Lead States, 2013b, p. 5). To address this need, students must see the interdisciplinary nature of climate science and its relevance in their lives.

Understanding climate change initially required the development of scientific research programs that bridged the traditional disciplinary boundaries of atmospheric science, oceanography, hydrology, geology, ecology, and environmental science to conduct interdisciplinary investigations to which all these fields could contribute. The interdisciplinary field of Earth system science grew out of this need in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Wainwright, 2009). More generally, an application-oriented perspective of science has led to a growth in collaborations across disciplinary boundaries to produce new fields of intellectual pursuit (van den Besselaar & Heimeriks, 2001) that are enriched by multiple disciplinary perspectives and analytical techniques.

The implications of climate change for society require further expansion, beyond the natural and physical sciences to include the social sciences, civic/government, humanities, and professional fields; moving beyond the interdisciplinary nature of Earth system science to the transdisciplinary nature of creating a society and a workforce prepared for shaping our collective future. Yet, academia and education remain divided into disciplinary departments, and scientists generally value deeper more narrowly focused research over broad interdisciplinary research (Bateman & Hess, 2015). This disciplinary approach has implications for faculty and research appointments, and for courses and degree programs that are aimed at preparing future scientists to continue that research. This remains a barrier to effective and efficient climate change education.

Systems Thinking: A Framework for Understanding and Addressing Climate Change

Systems thinking approaches offer a means to not only integrate across disciplinary boundaries, but also to understand the complex and dynamic nature of climate change. Growing recognition of the need to integrate knowledge from across disciplines has led to calls for systems thinking to be central to climate change and sustainability education (e.g., Barth, 2016; Claesson & Svanström, 2015; Hämäläinen, Luoma, & Saarinen, 2013; Iwaniec, Childers, VanLehn, & Wiek, 2014; Liu et al., 2015; Marcus, Coops, Ellis, & Robinson, 2015; Pruneau, Kerry, & Langis, 2016; Vincent, Bunn, & Sloane, 2013). Yet, the term systems thinking is often vaguely defined as a synonym for any holistic approach or consideration of interconnections. Here, systems thinking is referred to as a set of methods and practices for understanding the often non-intuitive behavior of complex dynamic systems, describing systems in terms of stocks, flows, delays, feedbacks, and non-linear behaviors (see definitions in Table 1). System dynamics extends systems thinking to include formal modeling, including: developing maps of dynamic systems that serve to elicit, share, and sharpen mental models; building models (including, but not necessarily limited to, quantitative computer models) that enable us to overcome our cognitive limitations in understanding dynamic complexity; and developing group or organizational processes to foster effective decision making and translation of insights into action (Sterman, 2000). Yet, in 2016 only 17 (out of >4,100) institutions of higher education in the United States offer courses in system dynamics (Systems Dynamics Society, 2016), and many of those are not explicitly tied to sustainability.

The Challenges of Climate Change Education

A Systems View of the Role of Education in Addressing Climate Change

The potential for education to be a powerful force in addressing climate change stems from its own role in social systems. Education is critical for science and technology based changes in individual behavior, workforce development and training, policy support, and policy- and decision-making. In the development of this article, a systems thinking tool referred to as causal loop diagramming, was used to better understand many of these dynamic interactions and the central role education and training play in fostering and implementing change (Figure 2 and Table 2).

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Figure 2. Causal loop diagram depicting the role of education in addressing climate change. Arrows between variables indicate that the variable from which the arrow originates causes a change in the variable at which it terminates. A + (−) indicates that the two variables change in the same (opposite) directions. Circle arrows surrounding an R or B identify feedback loops represented by the collection of variables and arrows surrounding them, with an R (B) indicating a reinforcing (balancing) feedback loop. Clarification of what each variable encompasses is in Table 2. Feedback loops are illustrated individually in Figure 3.

Causal loop diagrams provide a means to crystallize and share mental models of complex systems and to capture hypotheses about the underlying causes and feedbacks that drive dynamics. Causal relationships between system variables (stocks and flows) are depicted with arrows from a cause to an effect. The polarities (depicted in Figures 2 and 3 as a “+” or “−”) of causal links are used to indicate whether cause and effect change in the same (+) or opposite (−) direction. Reinforcing and balancing feedbacks (Table 1) are indicated by circular arrows around the letters R and B, respectively (e.g., Figure 1). Importantly, reinforcing feedbacks amplify change. In other words, a change in one system variable feeds back through the causal links to further amplify that change, leading to growth or decline. Conversely, balancing feedbacks dampen change, exhibiting goal-seeking or stabilizing behavior.

The variable “Climate/sustainability education and training” mediates transfer of knowledge about the causes and consequences of “Climate change/sustainability science” from scientific research to society (Figure 2). This enables a pathway to inform people about the potential impacts and causes of climate change, “Climate/energy informed people,” and delivers gains in literacy and an ability to apply their understanding to address real-world problems. Prior research has linked climate change understanding and risk perception to support for policies and intent to take action against climate change (Lee, Markowitz, Howe, Ko, & Leiserowitz, 2015; Rath & Rooney-Varga, 2015) leading to an increase in “Climate/energy active people.” As effective education and training related to climate change increases, the “Transition-ready workforce” is able to implement new policies or programs, and “Climate/energy informed people” and “Climate/energy active people” become larger segments of communities. Finally, the “Transition-ready workforce,” “Climate/energy informed people” and “Climate/energy active people” create “Social will and pressure” for transitions that lead to effective mitigation policies. The reinforcing feedback loops of “Learning for Action,” “Workforce Building,” and “Social Will and Pressure” offer a means to accelerate the social transformation required for the transition to low carbon economies and resilient communities (Figure 2). Because education plays a central role in all of the reinforcing feedback loops, there is an opportunity for leverage: Growing the diverse and mutually reinforcing climate change education programs could have far-reaching consequences for society’s ability to rapidly address and respond to a changing climate.

In the “Learning for Action” reinforcing feedback loop (Figure 2 and Figure 3A) “Climate/sustainability education and training” is the foundation to increasing the number of “Climate/energy informed people” and “Climate/energy active people.” In turn, “Climate/energy active people” support more education and training investments as demonstrated by Yale’s Six Americas research (Leiserowitz, Maibach, & Roser-Renouf, 2010). Education leads to “Climate/energy informed people” who understand the implications of unmitigated climate change and the possibilities of a transition to a low-carbon society. The more informed and engaged people are, the more likely they are to become active in the areas of climate change and energy transition. Actively involved people want to learn more and will seek additional “Climate/sustainability education and training” to do so and will encourage others to do so as well, closing the reinforcing feedback loop “Learning for Action.”

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Figure 3. Causal loop diagram depicting the role of education in addressing climate change with feedback loops highlighted. A, Learning for action reinforcing feedback loop (highlighted in green); B, Workforce building reinforcing feedback loop (highlighted in red); C, Social will and pressure reinforcing feedback loop (highlighted in blue); D, Impacts motivate education balancing feedback loop (highlighted in purple).

In the “Workforce Building” reinforcing feedback loop (Figures 2 and 3B) the role of “Climate/sustainability education and training” is a key input into the future workforce required to transition our energy systems based on climate mitigation policies. This occurs directly, as people are engaged in education and training to enable them to enter the “Transition ready workforce” and indirectly, as people become “Climate/energy informed people,” which leads to becoming part of the “Transition ready workforce.” People who are in that workforce see direct benefits of policies that support a transition to a low carbon society and therefore provide “Policy support for transition.” Climate change mitigation policies then grow, leading to greater “Demand for transition-ready workforce,” which, in turn, stimulates “Climate/sustainability education and training” efforts.

The “Social Will and Pressure” reinforcing loop (Figures 2 and 3C) intersects with the “Learning for Action” reinforcing loop through the branch that leads from “Climate/sustainability education and training” to “Climate/energy informed people” and “Climate/energy active people,” as well as a “Transition-ready workforce.” “Climate/energy informed people” understand the implications of unmitigated climate change and how a transition to a low-carbon society can be beneficial. They are more likely to be supportive of action to address climate change; as a result, they will actively provide “Policy support for transition” across sectors (businesses, other organizations, and different levels of government) that mitigate and adapt to climate change, including education policies. For example, those who negotiated the UNFCCC Paris Agreement on Climate Change (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2015) included Article 12, which recognizes the central role of education and obligates participating nations to enhance and report on their climate change education efforts. Conversely, in communities where science topics, like climate change, are perceived as societally controversial, barriers to advancement of climate science education reform are created, significantly limiting progress and delaying knowledge and skill building (Colston & Ivey, 2015).

The “Impacts motivate education” balancing loop (Figures 2 and 3D) indicates that direct experiences with the damage resulting from climate change leads to additional “Climate/sustainability education and training,” which leads to increases in “Climate/energy informed people,” “Climate/energy active people,” and a “Transition-ready workforce,” and thus, an increase in “Policy support for transition” for addressing the impacts of climate change (e.g., New York City’s climate policy efforts increased directly after Superstorm Sandy). The resulting policies that address climate change reduce emissions; and human forcing, often after a substantial delay (years to centuries or more), reduces climate impacts. The “Impacts motivate education” loop emphasizes that, especially given the long delays inherent in many climate change impacts, a reactive approach will lead to greater damage. However, through its link to “Climate/sustainability education and training,” the “Impacts motivate education” loop also feeds into the “Workforce Building,” “Learning for Action,” “Social Will and Pressure” reinforcing feedback loops.

There is another avenue by which support for policies to address the impacts of climate change can grow. A separate “Adapting to Impacts” balancing loop (Figure 4) illustrates that, as devastating impacts occur, people, from experience, become more informed about the impacts of climate change, and are thus supportive of policies to adapt to those impacts. Education is not part of this loop, so recognition of the causes of climate change and the need to mitigate against future climate change are not a consideration in the policies supported. As with the “Impacts Motivate Education” balancing loop (Figures 2 and 3D), the long delays between the emission of greenhouse gases and the extensive societal impacts mean that simply reacting to impacts will still result in extensive damage from climate change.

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Figure 4. Adapting to impacts balancing feedback loop. This does not include education, and the response is too late to effectively address climate change impacts.

In short, education is central to effectively addressing both the causes and the impacts of climate change. The causal loop diagrams depicted in Figures 2–4 clearly show conceptually the complexity of addressing climate change impacts. What is also apparent is that it requires all of society, as culturally and demographically diverse as it is, to participate in effective climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts.

Efforts to Integrate and Leverage Climate Change Education Activities

With the central role that education and training plays in addressing climate change across society, to what extent has society been able to build this educational capacity? In the United States, both federal agencies and private foundations have worked in parallel to expand support for a wide range of research and development investments to advance climate change education, build public awareness of the impacts of climate change, and engage communities on the climate change issue. These investments are partially described in the Tri-Agency Climate Education (TrACE) Collection (McDougal, Martin, Givens, Yue, Wilson, & Karsten, 2012) that integrates efforts by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF); the National Research Council’s Roundtable on Climate Change Education (CCE) (National Research Council, 2011a; National Research Council, 2012a), and the 2014 U. S. Climate Action Report to the UNFCCC (United States State Department, 2014).

Despite some of the protracted political and business efforts to undermine communication of the scientific consensus (mostly in the United States) on climate change (Oreskes & Conway, 2011), public awareness and concern is gradually increasing (Gallup Poll, 2016; Wike, 2016). Numerous educational case studies offer a glimpse into some of the programs that have achieved positive, and in some cases, significant on-the-ground results (Flora, Saphir, Lappe, Roser-Renouf, Maibach, & Leiserowitz, 2014; Lombardi et al., 2013; National Research Council, 2011b, 2012a; Spitzer, 2014). For example, the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE) has reached more than 1.6 million students in the United States alone, with a multimedia presentation that delivered gains in young people’s beliefs, involvement, and behavior to address climate change (Flora et al., 2014). Similarly, informal climate education efforts at museums and aquaria, such as the U.S.-based National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation (NNOCCI), leverage evidence-based approaches in informal learning, climate literacy, cognitive and social psychology, community building, and diffusion of innovation (Spitzer, 2014). With all the programmatic successes to date, larger societal success in addressing climate change challenges and opportunities hinge on wider comprehensive and coordinated educational investments across various audiences, managing and leveraging resources, and scaling or replicating effective efforts to meet the threats society faces (Ledley, Gold, Niepold, & McCaffrey, 2014).

Social and political scientists have demonstrated that success on effectively addressing climate change challenges and opportunities does not initially require a new prescriptive, top-down approach. Rather, community engagement in improved assessment of existing activities and resources, stronger coordination of efforts like the NSF funded Climate Change Education Partnership Alliance, http://ccepalliance.org/; the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN), http://cleanet.org/clean/community/index.html; and the National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation (NNOCCI), http://climateinterpreter.org/about/projects/NNOCCI; and enhanced collaboration across communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) to support a wide range of stakeholders. For example, one community of practice, the CLEAN Network, has identified the importance of a coordinated effort to synthesize strategies (Ledley et al., 2014, 2016). This climate literacy collective impact effort seeks to promote the coordination, collaboration, and leveraging of successful climate change education efforts through an overarching shared common agenda, shared measures of progress, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and a coordinating backbone support organization (Hanleybrown et al., 2012; Kania & Kramer, 2011). While the CLEAN Network has achieved some success as a rudimentary coordinating backbone support organization, lack of sufficient funding limits its ability to fully develop and implement all aspects of collective impact.

Further discussions within the CLEAN Network recognized the need to focus this kind of coordination at the regional/metropolitan area scale (Ledley et al., 2016). At this scale the specific impacts of climate change that need to be addressed are relevant to people, making it more likely that they will engage in climate change education programs and support policies to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Further work needs to be done to develop, test, and implement coordinated climate change regional/metropolitan area mitigation and adaptation efforts that include broad robust education activities. Examples of successful efforts in the United States thus far include the Climate Youth Summits; the Bay Area Climate Literacy Impact Collaborative; and College and Universities Climate Leadership. These efforts focus on increasing the resilience of social and ecological systems and/or building the capacity of the transition-ready workforce. There is an opportunity to draw on the best practices from across programs and to work collectively to enhance climate-related community decision making. Starting in 2012 at the Climate and Energy Literacy Summit (McCaffrey, Berbeco, & Scott, 2013), a series of six summits of the climate change education stakeholders illustrates that current programs and organizations are poised to be part of a coordinated network of networks solution framework (Ledley et al., 2014) and are primed to engage people in this new community resilience and low carbon transition strategy.

Internationally, nations agreed to achieve the shared goal to avoid dangerous climate change which explicitly includes education and training through both Article 6 of the UNFCCC (1992) treaty and Article 12 of the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC, 2015). Governments are working toward this by promoting and facilitating at the “national and, as appropriate, subregional and regional levels” in six priority action areas: education, training, public access to information, public awareness, public participation, and international cooperation. These efforts are working to effectively focus the enormous capacity of a nation’s educational systems to support these commitments; however many nations have limited resources and, as a result, organizations like the CLEAN Network have formed to compliment national initiatives. To coordinate this emerging international community of effective practice in climate and energy literacy, a new effort, similar to the CLEAN Network, was recently launched. In November 2016, at the Conference of the Parties (COP) 22 meeting in Marrakesh Morocco, the UNFCCC approved a special Education, Communication, and Outreach Stakholders (ECOS, originally ECONGO) community that is a system of networks to develop capacity in support of Article 6 Climate Education and Training of the UNFCCC (GLOCHA, 2016). The CLEAN Network represents the U.S. community in this international ECOS effort.

Examples of Successful Climate Change Education Efforts: Simulation-Based Games and the GLOBE Program

Conclusion

While the Paris Agreement has laid out ambitious climate goals, a wide gap remains between those goas and emissions reductions needed to achieve them (Kintisch, 2015; Rogelj et al., 2016). This article argues that the emissions gap cannot be closed without also closing the education gap—that is, the gap between the science and society’s understanding of climate change, the threats it poses, and the energy transition it demands. It is recognized that education for action requires more than scientific literacy; it must integrate concepts and dynamics across disciplines and in ways that address affective, social, and cultural forces—a challenge that can be met through systems thinking and system dynamics. Using a systems thinking approach, the potential for education to serve as a vehicle for rapid societal change is examined. As shown in Figures 2 and 3, education not only enables society to benefit from the projections climate change science has offered us but also plays a central role in several reinforcing feedback loops that can accelerate the growth of climate-informed decision-making at all levels, the social will and support for action, and the building of a transition-ready workforce. Many effective climate change education efforts have been successful in increasing climate and energy literacy and community capacity building. However, society still face challenges in coordinating initiatives across various audiences, managing and leveraging resources, and sustaining and scaling the effective programs to meet the challenges and opportunities posed by a changing climate. Education and training at all levels of society can promote and ensure strong and enduring government, business, and civic leadership and informed decision making by individuals, community leaders, office holders, and engaged citizens.