The role of climate change education on individual lifetime carbon emissions

connection to the environment. She admitted to deliberately concealing her vehicle type from the faculty, even though the faculty attempted to create a culture of acceptance with- out judgement. Later after graduating, this participant purchased a hybrid as her next vehi- cle. This is an example of the social norms that were established in the class that may have extended to students’ lives outside of school and over time. 6. Potential role of education on carbon emission reductions Given the reductions in carbon emissions calculated in Section 4.1.1 (and shown in Fig 3), we now explore the potential role of education as a climate change mitigation strategy. We start by estimating the participant reductions in carbon emissions compared to a control group. The control group is created by using California’s per capita carbon emissions data as esti- mated by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) [49]. We choose to use California’s per capita carbon emissions for two reasons. First, we do not have a good way to access course par- ticipant’s prior behavior retrospectively, and second, we assume that behavior after graduating from the course could change as students become professionals resulting in a potential dra- matic lifestyle change. The California per capita carbon emission data show that by 2014, per capita carbon emissions for the average Californian declined by 0.68 tons/year compared to 2009, the midpoint when students had graduated from SJSU. By contrast, the participants in COMM 168 reduced their per capita emissions by 3.54 tons/year. Thus, if we subtract the

emission reductions for the average Californian (0.68) from our participants (3.54), we find that the net reduction above the average citizen is 2.86 tons/year (3.54–0.68 = 2.86). We now use the net reduction in carbon emissions observed for graduates of COMM 168 to compare the potential role of education as a climate change mitigation strategy with other climate change mitigation strategies. For this comparison, we employ the methodology out- lined in Project Drawdown, where 80 different technologies or strategies are evaluated based on the potential to cumulatively reduce carbon emissions by 2050 [50]. The following procedure and set of assumptions are used to calculate carbon emission reductions associated with climate change education, as shown in Fig 6. We first assume that a modest investment in climate change education would allow students of secondary school age from middle and high income countries (where their carbon emissions are highest) to receive a specialized climate change education (i.e., using similar educational methodologies as we have described in this paper), and that students who receive this education would each reduce their carbon emissions by 2.86 tons of CO2/year (i.e., as in the COMM 168 course), for that year, and for each year following. Further, we assume that such a program would start small at 1 mil- lion students and grow by 13% per year until 2050, when the program reaches over 38 million participants. We use 2015 data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

Organization (UNESCO) [51] to estimate the number of students of secondary school age from high income and upper middle income as 298 million. This allows us to estimate the per- centage of students participating in this specialized climate change education program in 2020 and 2050, assuming the population of secondary students in these countries does not change. In Fig 6, six of the solutions presented in Project Drawdown are compared with our own estimate for using education as a climate change mitigation strategy. For the solution scenarios developed by Project Drawdown, each of these represents ambitious and yet also technically and economically feasible plans for reducing carbon levels. Technical details and reference lit- erature for all these solutions are presented at www.drawdown.org. As examples, the Rooftop Solar scenario grows the percentage of electricity generated by rooftop solar from 0.4% today to 7% by 2050, while the Electric Vehicles scenario grows the percentage of passenger miles from electric vehicles from less than 1% today to 16% by 2050. For the Climate Change The role of climate change education on individual lifetime carbon emissions PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206266 February 4, 2020 15 / 23