The Environmental and Climate Change Literacy Projects (ECCLPs, pronounced “eclipse”) is a multisystem initiative organized by the UC and CSU systems in partnership with key community partners to advance prekindergarten through 12th grade (PK–12) climate and environmental literacy, justice, and action.

Problem

Escalating climate disruption poses an existential threat to humanity, disproportionately impacting marginalized communities and the biodiversity of our world. California’s 5.8 million public school students enter adulthood with inadequate climate and environmental justice literacy. Although California science standards include climate change, less than half of US science teachers teach it, and those who do only spend 1–2 hours annually on the topic with varying content knowledge, limited training, and no rigorously evaluated learning curricula.

Solution

Build educator capacity through research and evaluation, teacher education, and community partnerships to educate, activate, and empower all California PK–12 public school students to be literate in climate and environmental justice issues and solutions to produce better equipped, voters, professionals, and environmental stewards.

Mission

Educate, activate, and empower all California students by the time they graduate to be literate in climate and environmental justice issues, drivers of solutions, and to become environmental stewards of our planet.

Goals

Short term

  1. Understand the existing landscape to support culturally relevant solutions for California school districts through a gap analysis via surveys and studies in three focus areas:

    1. Research

    2. PK–12 teaching and learning

    3. Community-based partnerships

  2. Implement solutions with relevant partners at scale across the state.

Long term

  1. Build the critical capacity, content knowledge, and confidence of current and future educators to empower students to act on climate change solutions by developing evidence-based approaches.

  2. Create a research-based climate and environmental justice teacher education model, replicable in other states and countries that recognizes education as a core climate change mitigation and adaptation strategy, which is central to catalyzing climate action. 

  3. Graduate all 400,000+ high school students empowered for positive social action with higher-order cognitive skills for critical thinking, metacognitive abilities to become lifelong learners in a changing world, communication and collaboration skills, and empathy. 

  4. Using education to reduce carbon emissions that further exacerbate climate change impacts and environmental injustices and threatens our health, air quality, water, food, shelter, and economic security.

Meeting Short-term Goals

  1. The three working committees are launching landscape analyses.

  2. Nearly 100 ECCLPs committee and workgroup members across the state are working to identify and implement solutions.

ECCLPs Map of all committee and workgroups members as of May 2023

This map indicates where each member of the ECCLPs committees (executive, steering, and working) and workgroup are based.