Climate education – Empowering today's youth to meet tomorrow's challenges

Empowering students to deal responsibly with the climate issue should be an important goal of education. From research in science education, we know a lot about students' conceptions of the science of climate, but less about their attitudes, priorities and decision-making regarding climate policy. We argue that in order to understand how young people relate to this issue, perspectives from sociology and youth research on young people's future images are an important, but under-utilised source of information. In this paper, we identify some challenges connected with climate education for empowerment. We also sum up some relevant perspectives from youth research and sociology as well as from science education in order to shed light on young people's relation to the climate issue. Furthermore, we give examples of a few existing resources for climate teaching. Finally, we discuss some implications for curriculum content and structure and suggest some ways forward for climate education for empowerment.

Printed in: Studies in Science Education vol.41, pp.3-50, 2005