Environmental Change and Social Welfare: Preparing Social Work Students for the Climate Crisis

There is a growing recognition of the need for the social work profession to respond to the climate crisis. However, few opportunities exist for students to learn about environmental change and its connections with social welfare. This article describes the development and teaching of a new elective, intended to help students to bridge environmental and social action, in both policy and practice. The article explores the opportunities and challenges that shaped the course, from reengaging with natural and built environments as a determinant of wellbeing, to understanding the complex and multi-faceted human impacts of the climate crisis. The article also outlines the course’s learning objectives, which are structured around social work’s traditional three levels of practice. The macro level provides space to approach climate and environmental change from a global perspective, with a focus on human impacts, and to examine equity and justice-based approaches. At the meso- and micro-levels, the elective focuses on social workers’ roles responding to intensive environmental threats, during disaster and displacement, as well as the more extensive and long-term challenges of urban environmental health and sustainability. Threaded throughout is a focus on social worker’s unique and urgently needed contributions to the human dimensions of mitigation and adaptation.