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SF State Will Be 1st to Require Climate Justice Course for All Students

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Members of the Bay Area Youth Climate Summit hold a climate rally and march at Dolores Park in San Francisco on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, to coincide with Donald Trump’s inauguration. Amid national policy shifts on climate change, San Francisco State University will be the first major public university to require students to take a course on climate justice. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

San Francisco State University will be the first major public university in the United States to require students to complete coursework on climate justice, not just climate change, officials announced Tuesday.

The university amended its undergraduate environmental sustainability graduation requirement to include climate change and climate justice, which means incoming students, as soon as fall 2026, will need to take a course in climate justice before they graduate.

“Our students’ lives are already being impacted by climate change, and so we think it’s part of our responsibility as a university to prepare students for that,” said Autumn Thoyre, co-director of the university’s Climate HQ, a hub to support climate-themed work on campus.

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The university defines climate justice as focusing on “the unequal impacts of climate change on marginalized and underserved populations and how frontline communities are often leaders in developing just climate solutions.”

Thoyre said universities have a responsibility to prepare students for a world altered by human-caused climate change brought on by the burning of fossil fuels globally. That can be done, she said, by teaching students the historical and “current systems of oppression and privilege, for example, around race, class and gender, and how those systems impact how climate change plays out and how we should address it.”

A group of runners passes through San Francisco State University in San Francisco, California, on Aug. 22, 2023. (Juliana Yamada/KQED)

The university aims to recertify more than 100 courses that could qualify for the environmental requirement to include a climate justice element. The requirement would likely be embedded in usual STEM courses but could also include English, ethnic studies, history or humanities courses.

“We’re recognizing that all jobs are climate change jobs in the future,” Thoyre said. “Climate change is an all hands on deck crisis that requires understanding and solutions from all different disciplines and sectors of society.”

The exact start year of the new requirement is still yet to be determined, and students who are already enrolled will not need to change course.

The decision comes at a pivotal moment in American history. For the second time, the Trump administration is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, under which countries worldwide agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions to curb the worst effects of climate change.

Thoyre sees the new requirement as part of local resistance to federal climate-denying policies.

“Local-scale change is a first step towards something bigger,” she said. “We’re not going to make good progress at the federal level in the United States for the next four years, so we’ll likely have a backslide. But so much of climate change innovation regarding policy movements and education systems is happening at a more local level.”

Isaac Barajas, a junior studying industrial design at the university, said that although he believes President Trump is already “doing horrible things for the environment,” he also has trust in local climate activism.

“There’s a lot of local people willing to show activism for it, and I think these classes might invoke more rallies and more people to get involved with it over the next four years,” he said.

Barajas said he would have loved to take a course in climate justice because young people face a barrage of climate misinformation online.

“I have fallen into the trap of believing things that weren’t real,” he said. “This climate justice requirement will allow more students to be socially aware and be more informed because there’s a lot of misinformation out there.”

Barajas, who grew up in the Salinas area, said he is well aware of the effects of climate change — droughts, deluges, and extreme rainfall — because his family and community have witnessed them in real time.

“Climate change is going to come for all of us,” he said. “If we don’t act now, it’s just going to catch up to us until we really won’t have a place to call home anymore.”

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