Dr. Heather Prime, Paul De Luca, Alex Markwell
A lot of action on climate change is aspirational. Pledges, pacts, and agreements are often non-binding and have no enforcement mechanisms. But aspirational action is action, and it often works – especially when the action is undertaken by many. York University’s Psychology Department is the first in Canada to sign on to the 1 in 5 Project, an initiative that asks academics and students to make climate change the subject of one in five projects or assignments.
The United Nations first recognised climate change as a major, urgent, global issue in 1992. In that year, the Rio Earth Summit resulted in the first international agreements on climate change. Then in 1997, the Kyoto protocol required developed countries to reduce emissions by 5% below 1990 levels – but developing countries (including China and India at the time) were exempt. Since that time, the developed countries have managed to reduce emissions by 17% (collectively). Germany had reduced their emissions 30% by 2020. The US backed out of the Kyoto accord in 2001.
More conferences, meetings, and summits have followed. 2009 in Copenhagen, 2010 in Cancun, 2011 in Durban, 2012 in Doha, 2013 in Warsaw. Agreements are reached, targets are set, countries back out, targets are missed, agreements fizzle.
In 2015, a landmark in climate change action was achieved in Paris. 196 countries signed on to the Paris Agreement, the most significant global climate agreement ever. The results? To be determined…countries can choose their own targets and there are no enforcement mechanisms to ensure they meet them. Since that time, there have been a lot more meetings…with mixed results.
All this said, many countries – including some of the most important ones – have made a concerted effort to meet the targets set by these series of agreements and accords and pacts. Although there is no enforcement mechanism by which they can be held accountable, the mere action of signing on to a global accord has, in fact, encouraged many of the world’s powers to move toward renewable energy and a greener infrastructure, though not nearly as quickly as many of us would like.
Climate progress is slow. But it is progress nonetheless. It may be frustrating. It may feel like it happens at a snail’s pace and not nearly fast enough considering the urgency of the issue. But it is happening, and hopefully the worst of what climate change could portend might be averted as a result.
In the past year, York University’s Psychology Department has joined the global 1 in 5 project. The project is a framework to allow the academic community to focus some of its collective brainpower on climate and biodiversity, and York is the first psychology department in Canada to sign on. The idea is that academic institutions commit to ensuring that one out of every five assignments, projects, or courses has an element related to climate change attached to it. Like other climate accords, agreements, and pacts, there is no enforcement mechanism, and no accountability – just the desire to improve the future for everyone on Earth.
Dr. Heather Prime, director of the Prime Family Lab at York University, has become a strong supporter of this project, which has meant incorporating climate change issues into her own curriculum as well as thinking about the climate crisis more regularly. The universities and institutions that sign on to the 1 in 5 project are not specifically held accountable for following the mandate. But there is still an effect. It may be slow – slower than we would like – but that is not on today’s researchers. The slow pace of social science around climate change is the result of years (and years) of avoiding the issue by the community at large. Says Dr. Prime,
“[The 1 in 5 project] serves as a kind of challenge to everyone to think about how you can consider climate change in your discipline. Moreover, it involves students in the process. In many ways later generations are more committed to the cause, because they’re the ones that will be most impacted.”
It has not been a straightforward process for Dr. Prime to implement the 1 in 5 mandate to her courses, and it may not yet be fully integrated. Her lab is specifically interested in family dynamics – how children develop emotionally within their families, how stressors on parents and caregivers trickle down to the kids under their care - that sort of thing. At first glance, this might not seem like the kind of place where researching climate change can have a major role. But it does.
As Heather, and her students, say – climate change is a factor in virtually every facet of our lives, which means it can have an impact in virtually every research project one can imagine. Not just in environmental science, but in the social sciences as well. Researching income inequality? That will be exacerbated by climate change. Depression and anxiety? For many those are made worse thanks to thinking about the impending catastrophe that faces us all.
And so, while the York University Psychology Department signs on to the 1 in 5 project, they are in the early stages of implementing it and have not yet reached the goal where 1 in 5 of their assignments is about climate change. As with so many climate change initiatives, it’s more of an aspiration than a firm commitment. But it has an undeniable effect.
Paul De Luca is a Master’s student in Dr. Prime’s Family Lab at York.
“I think the mandate of the 1 in 5 project is very motivating, because dealing with climate change can feel like a major uphill battle. But when you go on the 1 in 5 website and you see all these amazing projects that are currently ongoing, you feel like you’re part of a collective movement. And that in some ways informs the work I do, because I’m able to scroll through and see what other schools are working on and what other labs are doing. I can take that and let it inform the work I’m doing, and maybe identify some of the gaps. I think of it as a collective movement toward this shared goal of talking about climate change.”
It is sort of a soft target. One in five projects will be about climate change…eventually. But the mere act of signing on to the project, and to the pledge, has brought York’s psychology department into the conversation, and its students into the realm of climate-related science, and has encouraged them to think about their own particular specialties through that lens. Paul continues, talking about a study he saw on the 1 in 5 website.
“There was one proposed project about how childrens’ understanding of climate change and attitudes toward the environment change as a function of age. There was a fair amount of research from the adolescent perspective, but not so much from the vantage point of younger school-age children. When I see something like that, I start thinking about the measures we currently have that have been shown to work with pediatric populations. Do we have the tools to deal with things like knowledge of the climate crisis, attitudes toward the environment, and anxiety arising from that knowledge. And I don’t know that we currently do.”
Alex Markwell, another student in the lab, is working toward her Ph.D. and considering dissertation topics. She hasn’t paid much attention to the 1 in 5 project, and hasn’t looked deeply into it – her commitment to addressing climate change was a pre-existing condition. She does find the website and the fact that York has signed on to be encouraging.
“It’s nice to know there are a lot of other students who are interested and passionate in the same kind of things. I’ve mostly been focused on looking at the research that has been published over the past decade, but this is a good resource to look closer at what’s currently going on.”
For now, that is what the 1 in 5 project is for students and faculty at York – a resource. It’s also an aspiration. Changes to the curriculum so far have been minor. For example, Dr. Prime teaches an undergraduate class called Atypical Development, which is about the assessment and treatment of child mental health issues. For the past three years, she has assigned them a class activity centred around designing studies on COVID and families. This year, the assignment was focused on climate change.
The students came up with really interesting study designs. One proposed looking at how food scarcity relates to brain development. Another thought to track calls to crisis lines as a function of catastrophic weather-related events. A third proposed a study would look at recurring droughts in rural Canada and how that related to mental health issues. The students embraced the project, and for those who were feeling anxious about the climate crisis it was a useful way to channel efforts toward it. It’s a way of connecting people to their role in the outcome of the world.
The changes are small – but they are changes. The idea of the 1 in 5 project is fairly simple, that academics from all disciplines can come together to collectively tackle the biggest issue in the world, all by doing something small. This, it seems, is the path forward and the way out of the worst of the climate crisis – we don’t all have to change our lives to devote ourselves to this cause. We can all do little things, and observe those around us doing little things as well, and collectively that is a big deal for today and for the future.