Introduction

The state of the climate becomes increasingly severe, and action must be taken rapidly to both mitigate and adapt to climate change [1]. Education in its broadest sense is seen as a key for this purpose, enabling learners with competencies for this important task [2].

In Denmark, public discourse reveals an increasing sense of climate fatigue across learners in education, as the word klimatræthed (climate fatigue) has appeared [3, 4]. It describes increased disengagement among learners that appear exhausted from engaging with climate-related issues.

This scoping review is part of a national 4-year research and development project that develops a digital learning space for integration of education for sustainable development (ESD) in schools in Denmark [5]. It aims to engage upper secondary pupils in the green transition via collaboration with case-partners outside school [6]. The project also – through survey studies – studies climate fatigue in schools. This scoping review therefore aims to: 

Map and understand how the concepts engagement and disengagement in sustainability education has been defined, and discuss what could potentially be causing climate fatigue among learners

The following findings are based on a scoping review and qualitative reading of 36 articles. Only key findings and references are laid out in the abstract to stay within the permitted number of words in the references section.

Review findings

As mentioned in the method section, we didn’t successfully find any agreed upon definition of climate fatigue at all. The review further shows that even defining disengagement and engagement alike in sustainability education is difficult. Importantly, these two are not simply binary oppositions, signifying that the absence of the former means the presence of the latter [11]. 25/37 references didn’t define either concept, even if treating them explicitly, and one hit even questioned what qualifies as engagement [12]. As shown in the methods section, the number of hits found on engagement vastly outperformed the number of hits focusing on disengagement in sustainability teaching settings.

When studies did define (dis)engagement, it was seen as a contextual phenomenon, malleable over time, or even described through multi-faceted elements [13]. 5 studies mentioned Self-Determination Theory, for example suggesting that disengagement appears if a frustration of the basic psychological needs competence, relatedness or autonomy arises [11]. Similarly, studies in general relate engagement to a mixture of emotional, behavioral and cognitive features. Another key pattern is that engagement appears through working with and reaffirming identities.

 6 studies used assignments focusing on individual responsibility such as calculating personal carbon footprint and the like, while others called for a collective notion of engagement, often problematizing the former individualized perspective. In the studies learners are often complaining about individual efforts not making a difference in the bigger picture. Paradoxically, other learners feel that engaging in climate issues might also decrease feelings of powerlessness [14].

 Engagement can exist in different spheres, for example private, professional, institutional and political [12]. One study successfully reiterated on learning designs that encourage expanding spheres of possible engagement going from local and outwards [15]. Two studies describe a bias in that already engaged students are usually re-affirming existing beliefs or expanding their engagement.

 Social norms or different demographic backgrounds might hinder engagement [16]. 3 studies show that women in general are more concerned and engaged in climate-related issues. Engineering students might for example also get backlash for engaging in a political sphere, rather than simply a professional one [12]. This suggests that working with engagement through building identities over time or across different spheres might appear problematic based on identity factors such as fx gender, class or social norms.

All searches were carried out in the Aalborg University Primo Library Database. We were inspired by a scoping review method, as this is suited to examine a broad array of research, clarify gaps and key concepts in emergent themes, and give suggestions towards future research [7]. By conducting iterations, we identified the keywords. Only one single relevant article contained the word climate fatigue in the full text without further definition of it. Further, by examining only disengagement, we arrived at very few relevant hits. We thus decided to create two search strings, using the scoping method categories concept and context [7]. One search string for the concept engagement and one for the concept disengagement, while education for sustainability became the context for both. We hoped two strings could highlight any bias in terms of studying either engagement or disengagement. No scoping category for any specific education, country or population was made, considering the NW30 specific call that every education should be considered an environmental education. 1: Disengagement AND education AND sustainab* 2: Engagement AND education AND sustainab* We filtered all potential hits including only peer-reviewed hits in English. At this stage, string 1 generated 82 hits. As string 2 initially generated 8823 hits, we choose to include only papers that had engagement mentioned in the title and arrived at 194 hits. The big difference in the hits between the two strings alone strongly indicated a confirmation of a bias often prevalent in research, where connection and relations are often emphasized, rather than examining splits, divides and disconnection [8, 9]. Thus, methodologically, it would be beneficial to dare to examine learning designs and settings that also fail to engage learners more. No time frame was used, as most studies found in the scoping process were from 2010 and onward. All hits were then further screened based on the abstract through the following inclusion criteria, to make sure that the findings on engagement or disengagement were directly related to sustainability teaching settings and (dis)engagement here. 1: Focus on green sustainability specifically 2: Involve the educational sector specifically 3: Focus on how concrete actors, curricula or course designs are (dis)engaging. After applying these, we found 7 hits based on string 1, while string 2 gave 29 hits. This gave 36 hits in total. All these hits were then coded through thematical analysis [10].

Climate fatigue as an emergent educational problem is a societal task relevant across countries, sectors and levels, as it might influence future career paths, individual transformation and more systemic changes. Our review suggests the urgent need to conceptualize the phenomenon climate fatigue better, as no explicit definitions were found in the literature identified in our review. This is further supported through our finding that even engagement and disengagement are elusive concepts, often used in papers without definition. Further, there is a strong bias towards studies focusing on engagement rather than disengagement, suggesting that disengagement could fruitfully be studied more as a concept of its own in sustainability teaching settings. The literature on (dis)engagement in relation to sustainability education suggests that climate fatigue should be studied as a multi-faceted concept closely related to the context in which it occurs [13]. Considering fruitful perspectives on the context itself, we argue that we should keep the following in mind when studying climate fatigue as a concept in future research: 1) What spheres of engagement are activated (individual, professional, instutional, political fx)? 2) How does individual versus structural framings of issues enable or hinder engagement in relation to the sheer magnitude of climate change? 3) How do identity factors such as gender, class or social norms influence how inviting engaging in climate issues might seem for different actors? These questions coupled with a stronger focus on disengagement as a concept, will be relevant for future international research on climate fatigue in ESD. In future studies, different national, institutional and political contexts will most likely provide different perspectives on the concept. The above-mentioned questions will be brought into play in the upcoming interventions in the GreenEdTech project and thus give us a hint of the particular Danish version of climate fatigue.

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