UC San Diego Now Requires Students to Take a Class on Climate Change

To better prepare students for a future shaped by climate change, University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego) has a new requirement for first-year attendees beginning fall quarter 2024 and beyond. Students must take at least one course relating to climate change in order to meet graduation requirements.

As NBC 7 San Diego reported, the new requirements are taking effect for the incoming freshman class of fall 2024 that includes around 7,000 students. There are currently more than 40 courses that meet the newly established Jane Teranes Climate Change Education Requirement (JTCCER), which was named to honor Jane Teranes, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and climate education advocate at UC San Diego who died unexpectedly in 2022.

The new requirement will not increase the workload for students. Instead, the approved courses were selected to overlap with many existing degree requirements as well as the general education or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion course requirements for all students, meaning one course could satisfy more than one educational program requirement.

“We set up the new requirement with the best intentions to make sure that UC San Diego produces graduates who are ready to meet the challenges of a changing climate, regardless of their field of study,” Sarah Gille, a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said in a statement. “We need everyone engaged in this work, and we hope the JTCCER program will inspire others to follow suit.”

As The Guardian reported, a qualifying course will need to include at least 30% of climate-related materials that address two or more of the following criteria: scientific background for understanding of climate change; societal impacts of climate change; potential solutions for climate change; and hands-on projects or experimental learning opportunities.

Some of the courses that meet the JTCCER include “Documenting Climate Change: Past and Present,” “The Astronomy of Climate Change,” “Energy Economics,” “Indigenous Approaches to Climate Change,” “Introduction to Geochemistry,” and “Planning for Natural Hazards.”

The requirement was initially proposed by the UC San Diego Campus Committee on Climate Change and led to the Senate–Administration Workgroup on Climate Change Education for All formed in 2022. Teranes and Wayne Yang, professor a provost of UC San Diego’s John Muir College, were co-chairs of the workgroup and structured the climate change course requirement proposal on the university’s DEI course requirement, which was established in 2011.

“We took the best learnings from the DEI requirement — which Jane was also involved with — ensuring that the requirement does not add additional time to degree for students,” Yang said in a statement. “The climate requirement incentivizes and encourages faculty to integrate climate change education into their upper division courses, and thus deepens the curriculum by focusing on what students can actually do about climate change from their disciplines. Importantly, it treats climate change as an interdisciplinary issue.”