The Climate Literacy Guide, which was originally released in 2008, was a collaboration between eighteen federal agencies and departments, in partnership with many science and education organizations. The guide helped inform national education standards around climate change. In September 2024, an updated version of the guide was released that expanded the definition of climate literacy beyond climate science into economics, policy, and justice. In February 2025, the updated version was taken down.
Emma Buretta and Joshua Low from YPCCC’s Partnerships Program recently sat down with Haley Crim, former Climate Engagement and Capacity-building Coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office and the U.S. Global Change Research Program, to learn more about her work on the Climate Literacy Guide, future opportunities in climate education, and her partnership with YPCCC.
Emma: We know that you’ve been affected by the Trump administration’s changes to NOAA and the US Global Change Research Program. How are you doing and what are you up to now?
Haley: That’s a big question. I’m personally doing pretty well. Obviously it’s really hard to see most of your work be taken down, and everyone you work with get fired. But we are also in a place of moving forward and trying to figure out how we keep this work going, even though we can’t work federally, as we were before. So it’s a really bittersweet time of mourning what we had and also planning and hoping that we can get some really awesome new, creative, fun things out of this.
Emma: How did you get involved in climate work, and what was your pathway to where you are now?
Haley: So my story is I got really into the climate space in college. I had always been politically active because of my parents. I grew up near DC, so we were always pretty involved in and aware of what was going on politically. But when I went to college, I was going to do chemistry or computer science or engineering, I was very STEM focused. And then the college that I went to didn’t have engineering or computer science at the time. So those were out, and I took some chemistry classes, and realized then all you do, as a chemistry major, is chemistry. So, I was looking for a major that could let me take history and art and sociology and English and other languages and do the science that I was really drawn to, and I ended up in environmental studies. I don’t necessarily have a “climate why”, like some people talk about, but that is the honest truth of how I got into it, and I would absolutely not change it for anything. I love doing this work, and there’s infinite things to do because it’s so interdisciplinary.That still really is exciting to me. I would go crazy doing anything else.
Emma: Can you explain the role of NOAA and the US Global Change Research Program in climate research and climate education and where things are now?
Haley: NOAA has an Office of Education that has existed for a really long time and does excellent global change education and ocean education. I worked not in that office, actually, but in the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which houses the Climate Program Office. We work really closely with the Office of Education, and also offices at other agencies. It started out with a more K-12 focus, and as the field of climate education changed, it began to encompass informal education. That meant including museums and parks and anywhere else you might be interacting with educational material, outside of an actual school. Recently, in the past couple of years, we’ve been additionally interested in adult education, communication, and workforce development. Educating kids is essential to fixing this, but in order to address climate change at the speed and scale required, we need people with skills right now in whatever they’re doing with whatever they care about, to know about, care about and work on climate change. That’s why we’ve been working on adult education, communication and workforce development. A lot of the work that I did both at NOAA and at the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), was in that space.
USGCRP is the coordinating body for climate research across the federal government. The main thing that people might be familiar with is the National Climate Assessment, which is like the IPCC report for the US. It comes out every four(ish) years, and the most recent one came out in 2023. That is the assessment of record for the US of every aspect of climate change and how we can fix it. There’s chapters on all sorts of different things that you might be interested in, from your region to energy, economy, justice and social impacts, agriculture, and chapters on how climate change is affecting it and how those sectors can contribute to a solution. Another thing that USGCRP does that I was involved with is interagency working groups. There’s hydrology groups, carbon cycle monitoring groups, social science groups, and they’re just places to coordinate what the government is doing related to global change with respect to these different topics.
The one I was a coordinator of was the climate engagement and capacity building group, which does the education, engagement, awareness, public participation and outreach function. So we had about 120 people from 30-ish different agencies. It’s a huge group, with amazing, awesome people, where we did mini assessments, created databases of government made, publicly available trainings, and tried to coordinate the work in these areas across the government to make it more accessible for people.
Unfortunately, now, the US Global Change Research Program has been cleared out. It was staffed by a lot of contractors who were fired in April. The rest of the people at USGCRP are detailed from agencies, which send them to USGCRP to work for a couple years. They were all sent back as well. So, there’s not really anyone working at USGCRP right now. Under the last administration, they had chosen the authors for the sixth National Climate Assessment, and they were all recently dismissed. The National Climate Assessment is congressionally mandated, so they have to do it, but we’ll see what happens.
Then, on the NOAA front, I’m not totally up to date on what’s happening with NOAA Education, but the NOAA Climate Program office has been pretty reduced in staff as well. I was let go. I was a contractor, along with a lot of people in the Climate Program Office, and our contract ended at the end of May. That was pretty much everyone who worked on climate communications, so all of the staff for climate.gov, Data Visualization, all of the people who make the beautiful reports that NOAA puts out about climate change: they were all let go at the end of May. There are still people working on this there, and they’ll stick it out and keep doing good work as long as they can. So that’s the state of what’s going on.
Joshua: What has the American public lost since we’ve lost these experts doing this work?
Haley: That is tough to say. It’s almost incalculable, because we’ve lost both the potential for new work because of funding and staffing cuts, and the ability to conduct public engagement, which is deeply and inextricably tied to justice and equity. If you can’t do any of that, the quality of your science is automatically reduced. A lot of things have been taken down that taxpayers paid for, things you should absolutely have access to, some of which are legally required to be publicly posted. Everyone should have access to them, and we don’t. They’ve been taken down because they include the word justice, or they focus too much on the people who deserve to be focused the most on because they’ve been historically marginalized or left out of the conversation, or overburdened by pollution due to decisions that the government has made in the past. So we’ve lost knowledge that has already been created and should be for everyone. It was developed with the public in mind, and a lot of that, especially the more recent content, was developed with immediate public use in mind, and was developed to address what communities need right now as they’re facing these issues.
We’ve also lost the chance to do that in the future. It’ll be really, really hard to pick this stuff up, even if it turns around really quickly. The National Climate Assessment takes four years to make. You cannot just magically release one every four years, the process starts immediately after the previous one has been released. And so for things like that, there could be a prolonged delay in order to put something scientifically rigorous, accurate, respectful, and well done and that includes public engagement and all of the things that that you would want out of a government resource. So it’s hard to measure the loss, but it’s enormous.
Joshua: Do you think that it puts communities at risk when we see extreme weather events? Could it affect the ability of local governments to protect residents if they lack access to information such as the National Climate Assessment?
Haley: Absolutely. I didn’t even mention that the Fifth National Climate Assessment currently isn’t accessible on government websites, so you can’t even get the most recent information about climate as it relates to whatever you might care about. That’s super important: for local governments, for farmers who are trying to plan what to grow, for bankers or insurance companies who are trying to plan for the future and how they should be setting interest rates and where they should be giving mortgages. The danger is pretty immediate, from other cuts as well, for example, the National Weather Service can’t staff all of the offices overnight, which leads to really scary things. It decreases coordination, even though everyone is still doing the absolute best they can. Nobody’s giving up because of this, and people are burning out. But there’s not enough people and not enough resources to continue to do the high quality science, both on the weather front and the climate front, that we need to keep people safe. We’re already seeing the impacts of that breakdown in communication, and I hope we will fix it before we see more.
Emma: Why is it still important, that the general public learn about climate change?
Haley: Every moment is the most important moment you can learn about climate change, because it’s time bound. The earlier people learn about it, the better. And the more that we take action right now, the less we have to do later. Regardless of what’s happening, politically or with the government, we cannot stop working on this. It’s especially important that people are learning about climate change however they can and that they’re updating their information with the newest, most interdisciplinary information. We now have a lot of social science research behind this as well, a lot of it from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. It’s really important to keep moving as fast as we can in whatever ways that we can to spread climate information and increase climate literacy.
Emma: How would you define climate literacy? And could you tell us more about the Climate Literacy Guide?
Haley: For sure. Our official definition of climate literacy is that it’s an understanding of how the climate system works, how human actions influence the climate, and how the climate influences people and other parts of the Earth system. So it’s three pronged: you have to understand climate science, but it is not sufficient at all to know just about the greenhouse effect to understand what’s really going on. You also have to understand how people are affecting the climate, and then also how the climate impacts everything else that you might care about, from any angle. So the Climate Literacy Guide is a guide to provide what the US Global Change Research Program is putting forward as the most important things for everyone to know about climate change. About 70 people worked on this from around 30 different agencies, and it was approved by the US Global Change Research Program. It came out last fall, and it’s an organized guide of all the toplines from the National Climate Assessment and from the IPCC report. It’s the most up to date information as of last fall, and it’s written in a way that will continue to be helpful over time. There are links to learn more about everything from either the National Climate Assessment or the IPCC report. It goes through what we know about climate change from many different disciplinary backgrounds, and the scientific basis underpinning how we know about climate change, both from a traditional scientific background and also local and Indigenous perspectives. So that’s the first part.
Then it goes into climate science: the causes of climate change, with the top line being that burning fossil fuels and other human activities are causing the planet to warm and the undeniable evidence for that. Then it goes through impacts, equity and justice, adaptation solutions, mitigation solutions, and then the last part is on hope and urgency, and that actually leans a lot on the work that YPCCC did in terms of climate communication and a just transition and benefits of climate action.
Joshua: When I think about climate literacy, I remember it’s important because if people don’t understand the words and the concepts around climate literacy, they don’t understand the world and what’s happening to them. They can’t make good decisions about their lives: what they want to do, where to work, where to make investments, how to take care of their family, and how to take care of their community. This is a huge step forward in helping people understand what they should know so that they can connect it to their real, everyday life.
Haley: That’s what we try to get at at the beginning of the guide. In creating the guide, we discussed whether action is a key component of climate literacy. We concluded that you should be able to make good decisions and know what a good decision looks like. Climate literacy also includes the awareness that fossil fuel interests have misinformed people in the past and continue to do so. Climate literacy helps people navigate our new reality by helping people identify credible information, good decisions, and effective solutions -. And so this is an absolutely fundamental piece of doing anything with climate change
Emma: How did you all use YPCCC research and resources in developing the climate literacy guide?
Haley: We use them all the time. I’ve put them in reports to the UNFCCC. I put them in the climate literacy guide. It’s in pretty much everything we do, because it’s so important to know what people think and to cut through the rhetoric. Some people might say that the public doesn’t like or support something, but when you actually go back to the polling data you can see that actually it’s super popular. Those are two main points that come from your data. And we give credit to Katharine Hayhoe as well, who said the most important thing you can do about climate change is talk about it. A lot of our work, especially for adult education and workforce development, is just trying to get people to talk about it and think about how it relates to them. That comes from YPCCC insights.
Emma: The climate literacy guide expanded in its scope, from the 2008 and 2009 guides to the latest version. What exactly did you change, and why were those changes important?
Haley: Yeah, so the 2008 and 2009 guides are pretty similar, and they focused on science. So they’re really a teaching guide for climate science, which is super important and was picked up in the Next Generation Science Standards. It’s very well known and well used, especially in K-12 education and in college education. For the 2024 guide, we really wanted to expand both on what the content is beyond just science, and also expand the focus of the audience beyond just educators. We tried to write it with our three audiences in mind: education, communication, and decision-making.
So, a teacher will be able to use this to structure a class, or a museum exhibit planner can use it to make an exhibit and give the foundations for what should be in there. We also wanted to make this as a tip sheet for, for example, a journalist on TV, for what kinds of stories they might want to focus on, or what kinds of things you might want to cover in an article about climate change. We also wanted to answer some of the really common questions about climate change and how people can talk about it. And we wanted to make it for constituents, informing them of what they should expect their elected officials to know about the most up to date climate science in an accessible way, and lastly also for decision makers, what they should know and where they should go to learn more about things that are affecting their region or industry. We tried to hit all of those audiences with the layout and design of the guide.
Then we also wanted to expand it beyond just traditional western science and measurements, and look at it as more what you would experience in your life, so we included more consideration of local changes, of the economic impacts, of international relations and policy impacts, of emotional and personal ethical considerations, and also expanding beyond an empirical scientific background, into consideration of Indigenous knowledge, local knowledge, and making sure that those are all treated as very highest standard rather than footnotes to the science. We’re not just putting forward one way of learning about the world when there are so many valid and necessary ways for both learning about and tackling climate change.
Emma: What are some of the most important opportunities for climate education in the next couple of years, and what role could the guide play in that?
Haley: There’s a couple really interesting things going on right now. A lot of states have started putting in climate education requirements or expanding climate education in their state curriculum, because in the US, what is taught in K-12 schools is not dictated by the federal government. It’s all at the state level. There’s a lot of movement in that area towards talking more about climate change and teaching about it, in a much more holistic and interdisciplinary way. So that’s really exciting. There’s a ton of work going on right now in the workforce development space, helping people figure out how to talk about climate change and think about it in their job. There’s an emphasis on going beyond teaching kids or museum goers, and trying to reach everyone with these kinds of messages around climate solutions.
Joshua: You’ve mentioned workforce development a couple times, and the importance of people understanding climate change in the workplace. Can you explain, for example, why my mom, who’s a nurse in a public health department, should know about climate change in her day-to-day job?
Haley: That is an excellent example, especially because the healthcare industry is super impacted by climate change, and healthcare providers are some of the most trusted people to talk about climate change.So there’s both a huge impact and a potential solution in the healthcare industry, and you find those in a lot of different industries as well.
A lot of my job at NOAA was to answer these exact questions.Why should you care about change? And what does it matter to you? Climate change is impacting everyone, and everyone’s job, it’s not a question. For example, if you’re a healthcare worker, you might be seeing more heat-related illnesses, or more frequent storm impacts with mass casualties. We’ve unfortunately seen a lot of them recently. Or, interruptions to the supply chain, for example, when a hurricane takes out, where something is made. So there is a huge opportunity in that industry for realizing that these impacts are happening, and why they’re happening, and that will hopefully provoke a response, and allow people to act more directly on climate change, both in their personal lives and also in every other forum that they interact with. =
And then also people should know about it so that they can talk about it. Healthcare professionals need to talk to their patients about being safe in the heat, why extreme heat is happening, and why you need to know about it right now. Or they need to know about tropical diseases that are being found further north, for example. Or for an HVAC installer, they should talk about why you might want a heat pump, if you’re installing air conditioning for the first time, maybe you want something that’s more efficient. There are ways that you can both see the impacts and work on solutions in any industry. It’s really important that people not just have general knowledge, but also specific knowledge about how it impacts them and their work, and how they can work on climate change now that they know about that with their specific skills, because we need all skills in all industries to work on this.
Emma: What has been the single most exciting or surprising discovery you’ve made with your climate communications work?
Haley: It might be what I was just talking about: the number of ways that people can get involved. Climate change is so overwhelming, right? But the types of solutions that people come up with from their own experience are so incredible, and things that I’ve never thought about before, or that I’ve never seen in a study or anything, but they might actually have a huge impact. They’re really exciting. People are so creative, and it doesn’t require anyone to be a climate scientist in order to participate. It’s amazing the amount of creativity people have and also the ways that people show up.
Emma: Finally, how do you remain hopeful and inspired?
Haley: To me, it’s not really a question of hope; there’s just not an alternative to action. There are roadblocks–we’re experiencing them right now–but we have to figure out how to get around them, because there is this overarching issue with a timeline. Thermodynamics is not negotiating. That’s not a flexible timeline. We know exactly what we need to do. The money exists in the world, and the technology, at least to get started and to make a huge impact on this, already exists. So we just have to figure out how to hit some of these leverage points and let people start working on it. And honestly, I think one of the things that keeps me the most hopeful is from the Six Americas framework. The idea that people don’t care about climate change is a myth. Such a large majority of people care and support the things that we need to do, we just need to figure out how to activate them. It makes the problem seem a little bit smaller to read your studies.
We thank Haley for sharing her time and perspective, and for her commitment to advancing climate literacy.