Campus Compact and the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship are partnering to host the Addressing Wicked Issues through Community-Engaged Scholarship series. Each year, this series takes a deep dive into some of the most critical issues threatening our communities and explores how we—higher education community engagement professionals, practitioners, and scholars—can make a difference.

The 2025-2026 Addressing Wicked Issues series will focus on climate change and health. Climate change, as a structural issue, affects and will continue to affect all life across our planet. However, the effects of climate change are often unequally and unevenly distributed across different groups and contexts, highlighting the importance of addressing issues of environmental racism, unequal distribution of harms across space, and utilizing an environmental justice approach for cultivating solutions. 

To address this complex, wicked issue, we must utilize various perspectives, approaches, and multidisciplinary collaboration to achieve just outcomes. Utilizing public health, One Health, and environmental justice approaches, this series will generate a hub for resources, highlight important examples of resilience, collective action, and hope in response to the multi-scalar impacts of climate change on health, and create a space to explore how higher education can make a difference through community-engaged research, community engaged teaching and learning, and student civic engagement. 

Over 5 sessions, we will provide the necessary background and context on this wicked issue, including root causes around climate change, look at ways experts across disciplines navigate addressing the intersection of climate change and health through higher education, and stress the importance of cultivating climate hope for sustaining ourselves in the wake of this wicked issue. Hearing from experts in the field ranging from disciplines of biology, medicine, environmental science, sociology, dance, and more, attendees will be able to identify the structural causes of climate change and its impact on our collective health, articulate the shared agreement amongst interdisciplinary scholars on best practices within research, teaching and learning, and civic engagement for addressing the effects of climate change on health, address current issues impacting climate change and health scholars, and lastly, establish resilience through hope to create lasting multi-scalar change across contexts.