Coverage of climate change in introductory biology textbooks, 1970–2019

RESEARCH ARTICLE Coverage of climate change in introductory biology textbooks, 1970–2019 Rabiya Arif Ansari1☯, Jennifer M. LandinID2☯* 1 College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States of America, 2 Department of Biological Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States of America ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * jmlandin@ncsu.edu Abstract Climate change is a potent threat to human society, biodiversity, and ecosystem stability. Yet a 2021 Gallup poll found that only 43% of Americans see climate change as a serious threat over their lifetimes. In this study, we analyze college biology textbook coverage of cli- mate change from 1970 to 2019. We focus on four aspects for content analysis: 1) the amount of coverage, determined by counting the number of sentences within the climate change passage, 2) the start location of the passage in the book, 3) the categorization of sentences as addressing a description of the greenhouse effect, impacts of global warming, or actions to ameliorate climate change, and 4) the presentation of data in figures. We ana- lyzed 57 textbooks. Our findings show that coverage of climate change has continually increased, although the greatest increase occurred during the 1990s despite the growing threats of climate change. The position of the climate change passage moved further back in the book, from the last 15% to the last 2.5% of pages. Over time, coverage shifted from a

description of the greenhouse effect to focus mostly on effects of climate change; the most addressed impact was shifting ecosystems. Sentences dedicated to actionable solutions to climate change peaked in the 1990s at over 15% of the passage, then decreased in recent decades to 3%. Data figures present only global temperatures and CO2 levels prior to the year 2000, then include photographic evidence and changes to species distributions after 2000. We hope this study will alert curriculum designers and instructors to consider implicit messages communicated in climate change lessons. Introduction Climate change greatly affects human society and the earth’s ecosystems. Given the outsized contribution of greenhouse gasses from developed nations, and specifically the United States, analyzing climate change curricula can inform educational policy and practice. In this paper, we use document analysis of U.S. biology textbooks to explore the content, organization, and innovations of climate change coverage over 50 years. PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278532 December 21, 2022 1 / 16 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Ansari RA, Landin JM (2022) Coverage of climate change in introductory biology textbooks, 1970–2019. PLoS ONE 17(12): e0278532. https:// doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278532 Editor: Charles (Charlie) Jonathan Gomez, The University of Arizona, UNITED STATES Received: August 12, 2022 Accepted: November 17, 2022 Published: December 21, 2022 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the

benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278532 Copyright: © 2022 Ansari, Landin. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All data files are available from the DRYAD database (https://doi. org/10.5061/dryad.tht76hf2f). Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.