Environmental crises, such as climate change, and the coronavirus pandemic are “symptoms” of intertwined relationships among environment and and public health (Heyd, 2020) in an Era of Risk, challenging the field of Environmental Education (EE).  

Research about climate change education (CCE) states that Climate Change is a fact. There are many examples, from around the world, which corroborate that, for instance, as the effects of hurricanes in the islands of San Andres and Providencia, in Colombia, in Porto Rico and other Caribbean islands. 

For this reason, in many countries, especially in Europe and North America, CCE appears as an important topic that needs to be included in educational policies, as well as in curriculum practices (UNESCO, 2019). In Europe, some institutions have developed strategies such as platforms and projects to foster skills for adapting and mitigating climate change. In the United Sates CCE was included in curriculum practice. 

CCE is a concept that has not yet been fully disseminated throughout the scientific community at least in Latin-American countries. It is not widely known by the public in general either. Such acknowledgement justifies the need for defining the scope and the conceptual relationships between CCE and science and environmental education, in both formal and informal educational settings. It is also necessary to locate CCE at different levels, that is, in the context of guidelines and recommendations found in international documents, in multilateral organization papers, in curriculum reforms and in pedagogical projects that happen in educational institutions. 

In this paper we present a literature review of current CCE initiatives, taking into account the fact that discourses are translated across countries in different ways and that recontextualisation of educational policy depends on contextual features (Ball, 2006). 

We have conducted a literature review aiming at characterising aspects of CCE. We believe that “to revise means to look again, to resume the discourses of other researchers, but not in the sense of just visualizing, but of criticizing” (Moreira, p. 22, 2004) in a way that might allow for the proposition of new perspectives. Therefore, we seek to identify possible gaps as well. We have also adopted a comparative perspective for our study  as, according to Bray (2007, p.16), “academics undertake comparisons in order to improve understanding both of the forces which shape education systems and process in different setting, and of the impact of education systems and process on social and other development” 

Therefore, in order to better understand the term “climate change education” by the scientific community, we have reviewed several papers to study how the term is used in the different contexts. This research involves the identification of discourses, teaching practices and educational scenarios related to CCE in different countries. Our central question is as follows:

Which discourses, teaching practices and educational scenarios have influenced different constructions of CCE?

Our review is focused on studies that address climate change education, that is, where the educational process is central. Studies that focused on climate change aspects, but not non climate change education, such as those dealing with reducing emissions, generating resilient communities or managing climate change, were excluded from the corpus, as well studies published as reviews, editorials, book review, article commentary. The review intends to offer a descriptive analysis of CCE in the context of Iberoamerica, by looking at publications in Portuguese and Spanish, and in a more international context, through publications in English. We decided to limit our review to journal articles published in the last ten years (2010 to 2020) as we are interested in a more contemporary debate. We have used the expressions “climate change education” and “climate change” AND “education” (and their Portuguese and Spanish versions) as descriptors for our search. We have selected publications in representative journals in each language which were indexed at important databases. Redalyc, Scielo, and Google scholar were used to identify papers in Spanish and Portuguese while Taylor and Francis journal database was used to identfy papers in English). We selected papers that had the descriptors in their title, keyword and abstract. Following this first stage we have checked the semantic contexts of inclusion of the descriptor in the main body of the texts. We also classified the areas of knowledge (education, science teaching, environmental education, etc.) to which the journals are related. Once the articles included in the research were identified, the distribution of the articles included by journal and year of publication was proceeded. After identified the papers to be included, and to get our objective, we did activities such as document collection, codification with the software atlas ti, data analysis and the interpretations of results

Preliminary analyses was made on 92 articles. According to the distribution of articles over time, we found that there has been no publication of articles on CCE in a recurring and growing way. The US is the country with the largest number of publication on CCE with 39% of the articles, followed by Brazil with 7.14%, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Mexico each with 6.12%, and UK with 5.10%. Brazilian papers emphasise a critical perspective based upon Paulo Freire. One Peruvian paper proposes a hermeneutical analysis; Cuba, Costa Rica and Mexico publications include strategies for CC within EE; Puerto Rico and Mexico's papers focus curriculum, teaching, and representations on CC. Canada focus on how the country is committed with CCE at the public policy level. Papers from USA are concerned more at the level of conceptions, conceited errors and incorporation at the curricular level, and the approach of CC as a controversial question. Spanish papers concerned about the social representations of CC, Papers from Germany, Ireland, Sweden and England are interested conceptions of CC as a socio-scientific issue. In another UK papered in a paper from Holland we find proposals of an educational resource to stimulate learning whereas a Finnish paper is concerned with identifying attitudes and concepts, and proposing a model for the CC. The next stage of the research examines more closely the discourses which have been recontextualised in the CCE proposals that are described in the papers.

Ball, S. (2006). Sociologia das políticas educacionais e pesquisa crítico-social: uma revisão pessoal das políticas educacionais e da pesquisa em política educacional. Curriculo sem Fronteiras, 6 (2): 10–32. Bray M. (2007) Actors and Purposes in Comparative Education. In: Bray M., Adamson B., Mason M. (eds) Comparative Education Research. CERC Studies in Comparative Education, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6189-9_1 Heyd, Thomas. (2020). Covid-19 and climate change in the times of the Anthropocene. The AnthropoceneReview 1-16. DOI: 10.1177/2053019620961799. Moreira, Walter. (2004). Revisão de literatura e desenvolvimento cientifico: conceitos e estratégias para confecção. In Janus, Lorena, ano 1, nº 1. UNESCO (2019). Climate Change Education. Retrieved from https://en.unesco.org/themes/education-sustainable-development/cce