Have you ever wondered why we're so confident about the positive impacts of our expeditions on young people? It's because we have research that tells us they work!
A new academic research article on impacts of the Girls on Ice expedition, “‘You really see it’: environmental identity shifts through interacting with a climate change-impacted glacier landscape” has been published by Joanna Young. Joanna is a scientist at the International Arctic Research Center where she studies how quickly the glaciers of Alaska are shrinking due to climate change and what impacts those changes have on water supply, ecosystems, and people & communities. Joanna has been part of the Inspiring Girls Expeditions community since 2011. She co-founded Girls on Ice Alaska, has been a member of our Steering Committee since 2017, and is the Director of the Alaska Programs.
During her time as a PhD student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Joanna instructed on the Girls on Ice Alaska program several times, and witnessed how powerful it could be for participants to interact with a glacier landscape. She decided to embark on a study to capture these impacts, and invited optional participation in the study to any Girls on Ice expedition participants who wished to join. The study was conducted with approval from the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institutional Review Board, an important step for ensuring studies are carried out transparently and ethically.
Key findings of the article show that interacting with a climate change-impacted landscape first-hand deepens both participants’ sense of connection to the environment, and their desire to act pro-environmentally. Seeing a glacier landscape also provides a view of cumulative and long-term changes due to shifts in climate, which helps overcome many current problems inhibiting ‘belief’ in the reality of climate change, like relative invisibility and a lack of sense of scale.
The full article is available here. Check it out! Below is the abstract of the article. For more information on the study, feel free to contact us at info@girlsonice.org. And, if you’re hungry for more, check out this 2018 research article on how our expeditions improve participants’ ability to see themselves as scientists.
ABSTRACT
The global climate crisis continues to endanger the well-being of natural environments and the people who depend on them. Building elements of environmental identity may better connect youth to the changes underway. However, little work has investigated how experiencing a climate change-impacted landscape may support environmental identity shifts. This study explores such shifts in the context of a wilderness science program for youth in a glacier-dominated landscape with visible signatures of long-term change. We use a qualitative approach to investigate environmental identity development, relying on Clayton’s (2003) environmental identity model as a theoretical construct. We find that two aspects of environmental identity shifted the most: (1) relatedness to the natural environment and (2) pro-environmental motivation. Emergent themes from the analysis reveal that these changes arise from better understanding how ecosystems are interconnected, understanding human impacts on the environment, and witnessing first-hand the scale and rate of glacier loss. Our results imply that educators can privilege these aspects to support environmental identity shifts. Ultimately, our findings highlight that personally witnessing a visibly climate-impacted landscape may be powerful in promoting better environmental stewardship in response to the climate crisis.