Date and time: April 24 at 2:00 PM–3:00 PM ET

College is a time for discovery—a time to learn more about yourself and others. It is when youth move into adulthood. This transition should be done in an educated, sex-positive, healthy way. Colleges and universities have an obligation to teach students about reproductive health, especially for those that may have never had the opportunity in their K–12 school.

This presentation ties together reproductive resource accessibility and environmental sustainability by reasserting that reproductive rights are climate rights. In a growing world, we need to provide contraceptive and reproductive health services for all along with comprehensive sex education. Our presentation discusses the current efforts being made by 20 campuses and our research ranks them in a scorecard on everything from presence of an on-site campus health clinic to free condoms from a resident advisor to availability of abortion services. Often the universities who rank highest on reproductive services also have robust climate and sustainability programs too.

For the presentation, I have reached out to doctors Robin Mills and Nancy Wang to see if they would be interested in commenting on reproductive health resources on campuses. In our research, University of California Berkeley was ranked the highest as far as availability of resources—thus I feel it’s important to talk to one of their Health Educators–Robin Mills–about what can be done to further comprehensiveness of sexual education and student care on campuses. These health professionals are an incredibly valuable resource when we’re looking to enact definite change on campuses. As someone who has also done research on environmental issues on campus, I plan to take their information and tie that in to how improvements of reproductive resources can benefit sustainability—and how we can perhaps use university as a sort of microcosm for real-world applications.