Climate change is one of the greatest threats we face today, posing unprecedented challenges to societies at every level. While many people accept this, many also feel helpless before it, despite the minor changes they know they can make in their lives: from recycling to eating less meat. This sense of disempowerment can allow pessimism to seep in.
Work at the University of Plymouth is seeking to counter this pessimism and provide models for how we can match the urgency of the need to act with our potential as citizens and communities to make meaningful change. “One of the striking things that’s come out of a recent piece of research is that secondary-school children feel that the climate education that they’re receiving tends to be treating climate change as a kind of faraway problem,” says Alison Anderson, professor in sociology. This means, she adds, that they find it hard to relate to.
The research, carried out in conjunction with the British Science Association, found that young people wanted more climate education and for it to be embedded across the curriculum, whereas currently it is mainly siloed in GCSE Geography and Science. “They weren’t being given a sense of the socio-economic and political context of climate change, and most of the examples that they were hearing about were to do with the impacts of climate change. There was much less focus on the causes and solutions,” Anderson says.
She believes that a “project-based local approach” would he.