The role of climate change education on individual lifetime carbon emissions

Education scenario we assume that a) each student reduces their carbon emissions by 2.86 tons of CO2, similar to the COMM 168 course and b) the adoption of this type of education grows from less than 1% of all secondary students today to 16% of all secondary students by 2050 (note: the number of secondary students is restricted to only high income and upper- middle income countries where residents have higher carbon emissions). The results of this comparison show that education, if designed appropriately, can poten- tially be as effective as other established climate change mitigation techniques. Based on the scenario we developed, the implementation of climate change education over a 30-year period (2020–2050) could reduce emissions by 18.8 GT of CO2 eq, an amount that would rank in the top quarter (15 out of 80) of the presented solutions in Project Drawdown. Although at scale, the use of education as a climate change mitigation technique is still untested, our analysis sug- gests that if the educational approach is sound, and if we take the effort to measure the impact of education, we may realize the potential to reduce carbon emissions using education. We also acknowledge that although barriers to developing a successful large-scale climate change Fig 6. Comparison of various existing technologies that can be applied over a 30-year period (2020–2050) to help reduce global carbon emissions. The potential role of climate change education programs is calculated using the per student carbon reductions estimated from the COMM 168 course.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206266.g006 The role of climate change education on individual lifetime carbon emissions PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206266 February 4, 2020 16 / 23