How recent hurricanes are shaking up college students’ climate concerns

When Liv Barefoot first heard that Hurricane Helene was heading to the University of North Carolina at Asheville, she didn’t expect it to upend her senior year and increase her concern about climate change.

That’s because he’s always considered the mountains of North Carolina to be a “climate safe haven,” protected from the threats of the kinds of hurricanes that have long ravaged residents of Florida and Louisiana.

“We expected flooding, as usual, when there are strong storms,” ​​said Barefoot, who is president of the student body at UNC Asheville. None of us were prepared—mentally or otherwise—for the scale of destruction and catastrophic flooding that would occur as a result.”

But when the Category 4 storm made landfall in Asheville on the night of September 27, the intensity of the storm began to sink in.

“My fear was that the trees were cracking all around me. The rain kept falling through the curtains, I saw standing trees blowing hard,” said Barefoot, who lost electricity and cell phone the next morning and was unable to communicate with his family for two days. “That’s when I realized that this is very intense. I don’t think I’ve ever lived through a storm this bad before. I started to worry a lot about what this was going to look like.”

Daylight revealed the extent of the damage (now estimated at nearly $50 billion) to UNC Asheville, the surrounding community and much of western North Carolina. Due to the destruction, the university lost access to clean water and sent all of its nearly 3,000 students home, including 46 percent of those who live in campus housing.

Since that early morning, UNC Asheville officials have begun rebuilding and, in the meantime, suspended in-person classes until spring. Classes resumed online at the end of last month, and residence halls have reopened, although the campus was not yet fully serviced with potable water.

UNC Asheville and other campuses hit by hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters this year will rebuild. Usually they do. But experts say those resilience plans should take into account that with all natural disasters like Helene, students worry more about their chances of experiencing the worst weather events in their lives, regardless of where they live in the country.

“It’s been on my radar for a while,” Barefoot said of the long-term effects of climate change. “I don’t know if it’s ever fully reached the level of consistent climate concern so far.”

He is not far from alone. And that concern is something UNC Asheville and other colleges across the country have been trying for years to alleviate and redirect into solutions.

Generations, Political Divides

According to a peer-reviewed study published in Lancet Planetary Health last month, 85 percent of Americans ages 18 to 25 (across the political spectrum) are concerned about the impact of climate change on people and the planet. More than 60 percent say climate change makes them anxious, powerless, afraid, sad and angry, while 38 percent say their feelings about climate change affect their ability to work every day.

“As people report that their area is affected by many types of extreme weather events, their distress increases and their desire to take action increases,” said Eric Lewandowski, lead author of the study and an associate professor at the clinic. of child and adolescent psychiatry at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

Ninety-nine percent of scientists say the increase in global temperatures over the past 30 to 40 years due to man-made greenhouse gases, poses “significant risks to humanity” if it continues, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Climate Portal.

However, the community is very divided in terms of age and political party.

While 54 percent of all Americans view climate change as a major threat, that’s true of 78 percent of Democrats and just 23 percent of Republicans, according to a 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center. But even within conservative circles, the productivity divide is clear: 67 percent of Republicans under the age of 30 prioritize the development of alternative energy sources, while 75 percent of Republicans 65 and older prioritize increasing oil, coal and natural gas production.

The latest opinion echoes the views of Republican president-elect Donald Trump, who has repeatedly dismissed concerns about climate change, calling it “one of the biggest scams of all time” over the weekend Hurricane Helene hit the Southeast.

But such talk does not play well with most young people, regardless of their political affiliation.

Colleges Should ‘Talk About It’

According to the The Lancet According to the survey, more than half of college-age respondents, including a mix of Democrats and Republicans from all 50 states, feel ignored or dismissed when they try to talk about climate change; about 70 percent said they both want to talk about the dangers of climate change and that older generations understand how they feel.

However, the most helpful way to deal with weather-related mental stress is to “talk about it,” Lewandowski says. “If you have a place to do that, you can find that other people share your concerns, validate your concerns and there is support to communicate.”

Colleges and universities provide a natural platform to not only express that frustration, but also educate students about why wildfires, floods and hurricanes like Helene occur with such frequency and intensity and what they might be able to do about them in the coming decades.

That’s what John Hildebrand, an oceanography professor at the University of California, San Diego, hopes to accomplish by teaching a course on climate change and society this semester, one of about 40 courses that fulfill UCSD’s new climate change education requirement.

“This generation of college students will be here for a long time, and it will be a different world 50 years from now,” he said. “We must all realize that this generation will have to face it and we need the tools to do so. Part of that is understanding the science behind it, how it interacts with the social organizations we have and the tools we have to fix it.”

As part of his class, students participate in a simulation of the future, such as a city planner in 2050 Los Angeles trying to keep sea levels from rising so they don’t destroy the airport and some neighborhoods.

“It’s just not [telling students] that these bad things will happen and there is nothing you can do,” he said. “Whether they like it or not, there will be a role for them to mitigate the impact.”

But the effects of hot weather on higher education institutions “is nothing new,” said Kim van Noort, chancellor of UNC Asheville, who has been dealing with natural disasters on university campuses for decades.

In 2005, the University of Texas at Arlington, where van Noort once served as director of academic affairs, seized faculty and students were displaced by Hurricane Katrina. He worked in the UNC system office after Hurricane Florence hit North Carolina’s Outer Banks in 2018 and helped direct cleanup efforts at UNC Wilmington.

“Anxiety is natural no matter what disaster happens—no matter what time it is,” said van Noort, noting that as weather conditions worsen, he focuses on “talking openly with students and our community about the ways we are working. to reduce future problems.”

Before Helene hit UNC Asheville in September, the university was already making efforts to prioritize sustainable infrastructure and climate education, aiming to be net neutral by 2050 and launching a master’s degree in climate resilience.

“We knew the storm was coming and its impact on us, but we had a whole week of record-breaking rain before the storm came,” said van Noort. “We did not expect the flood levels. We knew the night before that things were going to be worse than we expected.”

‘Improving’ Mental Strength

After the storm, the university launched a disaster resilience program, which included a program to engage students in building wells, tanks and solar grids designed to withstand future severe flooding and power outages. And it’s part of an effort to expose them to opportunities to channel climate concerns into action—perhaps even work—and, at the very least, build personal resilience.

“I think students will want to come here and be a part of what we do,” said van Noort. “It’s not just about the resilience of our buildings, but it’s about the resilience of our people and the ways they feel equipped to deal with natural disasters like this.”

And once the trees are cleared and the campus is fully reopened, he said “increasing” that “mental toughness” will be “part of what we’re talking about” in the context of climate resilience.

Some of those efforts began at UNC Asheville shortly after Helene stepped on campus. The university organized individual and group counseling sessions for students navigating the aftermath of Helene and the stark realization that not even the Blue Ridge Mountains can protect Asheville from the storm.

“The night after the storm, things were so busy that I didn’t hear much,” said Owen James, a senior at UNC Asheville who sheltered on campus during the storm. But after they all left, the conversation soon turned to frustration and worry about what the future might hold.

“People were thinking about how the storm got here,” he said. “This is the reason why we are aware of things and make concrete changes to ensure that something like this does not happen again.”

But that sense of urgency isn’t limited to students at UNC Asheville, the University of South Florida and any other colleges that had to close during this year’s hurricane season.

The concern — and the realization that climate policy intersects with other social justice movements — is part of what pushed Rhea Goswami, a junior computer scientist at Cornell University, to found the Environmental Justice Coalition in 2021.

“Concerning the climate is what keeps me going,” said Goswami, who is also a member of the Gen Z Advisory Board of the Climate Mental Health Action Network.

“We need more cooperation. Nothing will move the needle if one person does it,” he said. “If I can get one more person involved in the movement, that’s better than sitting on the sidelines.