As higher education leaders in California and Louisiana, we see the impacts of the changing climate across the communities we serve.

Propelled by historically warm oceans, after the hottest July ever recorded, Hurricane Idalia wreaked deadly havoc across the Southeast. In Louisiana, the record heat exacerbated hundreds of still-burning wildfires. In California, when Tropical Storm Hilary hit, the National Weather Service warned of life-threatening flooding, the streets filled with mud and residents were evacuated by bulldozers.

As these events demonstrate, our students, faculty, staff and institutions are at severe and sustained risk from the increasingly destabilized climate. Climate change will impact the entire system of higher education — its operations, facilities, fiscal model and mission. With each unprecedented weather event, our systems are being tested and too often fail — even as we welcome students back to our campuses this fall.

This means that we must be at the forefront of a response to climate change, supporting the health and welfare of our campus communities and understanding the myriad effects of the climate crisis on students. Many have been displaced from their homes by severe weather events; all are impacted by excessive heat and heightened levels of climate anxiety.

Yes, this is yet another opportunity for higher education to focus on resilience, but we must do more than merely navigate daily challenges.

Our mission to prepare students and graduates to lead calls upon us to actively address what leadership means in a changing global climate. As stewards of our communities, we serve as hubs of learning and research, and now we must incorporate climate literacy and climate action too.

As co-chairs of the Higher Ed Climate Action Task Force with the Aspen Institute, we recognize the scale of these challenges and the opportunity for higher education to advance solutions. Our task force consists of students, faculty, college presidents, business leaders, climate leaders and former government officials working together to build on the important leadership that we have seen emerging in our sector.

Hundreds of campuses have begun working to reduce their carbon footprints and increase climate resiliency through Second Nature’s Climate Leadership Commitments, and we must advance this action more broadly.

We are in the vanguard, too, of real solutions: Much of the research documenting the climate crisis and advancing potential responses originates from colleges and universities.

Yet, both the scale of the problem and the currently under-utilized asset of higher education highlight the urgent need to do much more. Our task force will create a road map for higher education’s expanded role. This means teaching students, advancing research and embracing our mission to serve a broader public good alongside other social leaders. It also means, more specifically, training the clean energy workforce and partnering with key sectors, including businesses, government and community-based organizations, to find ways to remediate the damage and remove the threat to future generations.

Read the full article about climate change and higher education by Mildred García And Kim Hunter Reed at The Hechinger Report.