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Climate Change Education in Secondary Schools: Gaps, Challenges and Transformative Pathways: Comparison
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Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Abigail Zou and Version 1 by Gregorio Jimenez Valverde.

Climate change education (CCE) is increasingly recognized as a key lever for responding to the climate crisis, yet its implementation in schools often remains fragmented and weakly transformative. This review synthesizes international research on CCE in secondary education, focusing on four interconnected domains: students’ social representations of climate change (SRCC), curricular frameworks, teaching practices and teacher professional development, and emerging pathways towards transformative, justice-oriented CCE. A narrative review of empirical and theoretical studies reveals that students’ SRCC are generally superficial, fragmented and marked by persistent misconceptions, psychological distance and low perceived agency. Curricular frameworks tend to locate climate change mainly within natural sciences, reproduce deficit-based and behaviorist models and leave social, political and ethical dimensions underdeveloped. Teaching practices remain predominantly transmissive and science-centered, while teachers report limited training, time and institutional support, especially for addressing the affective domain and working transdisciplinarily. At the same time, the literature highlights promising directions: calls for an “emergency curriculum” and deeper curricular environmentalization, the potential of socio-scientific issues and complexity-based approaches, narrative and arts-based strategies, school gardens and community projects, and growing attention to emotions, hope and climate justice. Drawing on a narrative and integrative review of empirical and theoretical studies, the article identifies recurrent patterns and gaps in current CCE research and outlines priorities for future inquiry. The review argues that bridging the knowledge–action gap in schools requires aligning curriculum, pedagogy and teacher learning around four key principles—climate justice, collective agency, affective engagement and global perspectives—and outlines implications for policy, practice and research to support more transformative and socially just CCE.

  • climate change education
  • secondary education
  • social representations
  • curriculum
  • teaching practices
  • teacher professional development
  • climate justice
  • eco-citizenship
Climate change (CC) is now widely recognized as a global, multidimensional and interconnected threat that affects ecological, social, economic and cultural systems in deeply uneven ways [1,2][1][2]. It is often described as a “wicked problem”, characterized by scientific uncertainty, multiple causes and stakeholders, and the absence of simple, technical solutions [3]. The crisis has also been described as a “triple helix” of scientific, political and social dimensions, a framing that underscores both its global reach and the need for responses that move beyond technological innovation [4]. Beyond its biophysical and techno-scientific dimensions, CC is increasingly understood as a systemic crisis—one rooted in cultural values, identity, and anthropocentric worldviews—requiring deep shifts in how societies imagine human–nature relationships and envision alternative futures [5,6][5][6]. Since the Paris Agreement explicitly called for education, public awareness and capacity building as key pillars of climate action, climate change education (CCE) has emerged as a distinct field within educational research and practice [7].
Within this context, CCE is increasingly framed as a societal mission that must be complexity-oriented, intergenerational and interdisciplinary [8,9][8][9]. Rather than focusing only on transmitting climate science, CCE is expected to support an ecosocial transition and nurture sustainable “good living”, linking climate literacy with values, participation and cultural change [8,10][8][10]. When CCE presents the issue as a set of decontextualized facts, its ethical and political meaning is diminished [11]. Consistent with this, research in different countries shows that knowing about CC does not automatically lead to coherent practices: young people often report high levels of concern but only limited behavioral change, revealing a persistent knowledge–action gap [12,13,14][12][13][14]. Large-scale surveys also show that environmental knowledge and attitudes predict pro-sustainability behavior only weakly [15]. This tension is particularly acute in adolescence, when secondary students are intensively constructing their identities, are highly exposed to news and social media, and begin to socialize climate-related knowledge among peers, so that school learning becomes only one of several, and sometimes conflicting, sources of meaning.
However, environmental concern is shaped by social trust, media exposure and direct experience of climate impacts, while contrasting effects of secondary and tertiary education point to cultural polarization and technophilic optimism [16]. To address this gap, CCE must therefore work on motivation, ethics and action, reducing psychological distance, fostering critical reflection and emotional engagement, strengthening civic empowerment, and rethinking curricular approaches accordingly [17,18,19,20][17][18][19][20].
These demands resonate with broader debates, which call for pedagogies that are explicitly transformative and promote complexity-oriented, systemic, critical and creative thinking [21]. Sustainability itself is understood as a sophisticated educational construct that should be connected, through knowledge, values and practices, to equity, future-oriented thinking and social justice, rather than reduced to generic environmental awareness [22]. From this standpoint, CCE combines two interrelated dimensions: educating about climate—grounded in rigorous scientific literacy—and educating for change, which brings ethical, civic and participatory dimensions into dialogue with scientific knowledge [23,24][23][24]. Rather than privileging one over the other, effective CCE requires weaving together conceptual understanding and holistic pedagogies that foster critical citizenship. In line with this, the literature increasingly converges on four key pillars for CCE: critical understanding of climate systems and drivers, cooperative and collective action, ecosocial ethics [8,25][8][25] and the capacity to adapt and build community resilience [10,26][10][26].
Several global and regional reviews have attempted to map this emerging field. They highlight, among other aspects, the importance of analyzing student attributes and representations, pedagogical approaches and teacher knowledge as interconnected dimensions of CCE [20]. More recent syntheses emphasize the need for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, as well as stronger curricular integration across subjects and school levels [9,27][9][27]. At the same time, they point to enduring tensions and controversies: between individual behavior change and structural transformation, between “neutral” scientific teaching and explicitly justice-oriented education, and between policy discourses that promote CCE and the limited support actually provided to schools and teachers [4,8][4][8].
Building on this body of work, the present review focuses specifically on CCE in school settings and examines four interrelated domains: students’ social representations of climate change (SRCC), curricular frameworks, teaching practices and teacher professional development, and emerging pathways towards transformative, justice-oriented CCE and eco-citizenship. Secondary education is a particularly strategic level for this analysis, as it is a period in which young people’s increasing autonomy, digital connectivity and civic awareness intersect with intensified exposure to climate information and with the knowledge–action gap outlined above. It identifies recurring gaps across these domains: superficial and often distorted student understandings, fragmented and weakly implemented curricular provisions, predominantly transmissive, science-centered pedagogies, and insufficient institutional support for teachers. In doing so, this review extends and complements recent systematic and scoping syntheses by concentrating especially on CCE at the secondary level and by analyzing how these four domains, often examined separately, jointly contribute to, and may help address, the persistent knowledge–action gap highlighted above.
Rather than conducting an exhaustive systematic review, we adopted a narrative and integrative approach, combining systematic search procedures with iterative, theory-driven selection in order to construct a conceptually rich but manageable corpus. We focused on empirical and conceptual contributions on CCE and closely related fields (environmental education and education for sustainable development) in school settings, with particular emphasis on secondary education, while also including relevant research on initial and in-service teacher education, published mainly between 2000 and 2025.
The literature was identified through iterative keyword searches in major education and interdisciplinary databases (Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, ERIC, and Google Scholar), complemented by backward and forward citation tracking and targeted retrieval of key policy documents and competence frameworks. Search strings combined terms such as climate change education, education for sustainable development, environmental education, secondary education, teacher education, social representations, curriculum, teaching practices, and climate justice. This identification stage yielded 256 records (Table 1). Following the removal of duplicates, titles and abstracts were screened to exclude purely technical climate science publications, narrowly sectoral studies, and sources with only tangential educational relevance or outside the four focal domains of the review. This screening stage resulted in the exclusion of 180 records. The remaining 134 publications were assessed through full-text reading to determine their substantive empirical or theoretical contribution to at least one of the focal domains (students’ social representations of climate change, curriculum frameworks, teaching practices, or teacher education). Based on this eligibility assessment, 21 sources were excluded due to limited analytical depth or insufficient thematic fit. The final corpus therefore comprised 114 sources, including peer-reviewed journal articles and scholarly book chapters, which were prioritized for evidentiary claims, as well as a smaller set of policy reports and competence frameworks used primarily for contextual and analytical framing.
Table 1. Search and selection overview.
Table 1. Search and selection overview.
Stage Sources/Procedure Criteria Output
Identification Web of Science, Scopus, ERIC, Google Scholar; iterative keyword searches; citation chasing; targeted retrieval of policy/framework documents Focus on CCE and adjacent constructs in school and teacher-education contexts. Publications available in English, Spanish or Catalan, with selective inclusion of Portuguese and French when conceptually salient. Sources identified (n = 256)
Screening Title/abstract screening Exclude purely technical climate science; narrowly sectoral; tangential to education; outside focal domains 76 Excluded

(n = 180)
Eligibility Full-text reading and thematic fit check Include substantive empirical findings or theoretical analyses relevant to ≥1 focal domain 45 Excluded after full text

(n = 135)
Included Final corpus used in synthesis Peer-reviewed research prioritized for evidentiary claims; policy/framework docs used for contextual framing Included sources (n = 114)
Geographically, the corpus is dominated by studies conducted in Europe and Latin America, with a smaller number of contributions from other world regions. This reflects both the concentration of CCE research in these contexts and the language filters applied, and it constitutes a limitation that is taken up in the discussion and conclusions below.

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