Increasing climate awareness through public art

COOL SCIENCE, an organization that uses youth art and science to deliver meaningful climate education, joined forces with Mario Umana Academy, a dual-language public K–8 school in East Boston. Together they created the Sea Level Rise mural, an impressive bilingual mural with 600-plus tiles that celebrates the community’s strengths, while also depicting the urgent climate issues facing the area along Boston Harbor, where the school is situated.

Throughout the 2022–2023 school year, Umana’s third- through eighth-grade students and the school community organized mural tiles into nine themed panels. The panels display the role of biodiversity in sustainable and resilient ecological communities, the students’ values, such as inclusivity and respect, and the school’s vulnerability to flooding. The mural—made possible through funding from the National Science Foundation—serves as a powerful tool for educating the community and reinforcing the pressing issue of climate change and ways to address it. In a panel titled “We Can Adapt!” the tiles illustrate three key strategies the students learned for mitigating flooding:

1) absorb (such as creating marshes);

2) elevate (such as putting structures on stilts or floats); and 3) construct (such as building nature-based berms and living seawalls).

“The first step to understanding the impact and urgency of climate change is awareness, and a critical element of developing approaches to address climate change is hope,” said Bob Chen, Cool Science’s lead science expert and a professor and the interim dean at the UMass Boston School for the Environment. “This mural project does both and is an example of how Cool Science engages and educates children through art and science. And the benefits extend to the broader community.”