A scoping review on climate change education

The growing urgency of the climate crisis necessitates innovative educational approaches to equip people with the knowledge and skills to address climate challenges and be able to influence policy effectively. Education can be a central asset to promoting climate action, yet the importance of climate change education has been underexposed in large and influential assessment reports such as those from the IPCC. This study provides a comprehensive mapping of the literature on climate change education with a particular focus on the time period 2008-2023. By combining human coding and natural language processing (NLP) techniques, we examined a diverse corpus of over 6’000 publications from the peer reviewed literature. The findings highlight the pivotal role of climate education across various disciplines and its alignment with critical climate research themes such as adaptation, mitigation, disaster risk management, and sustainability. Our analysis reveals three predominant topics within the literature which are related to effective learning methodologies, sustainable development education, and the importance of education in adaptation and resilience. Additionally, we identified emerging themes emphasizing the role of youth as change agents, the necessity of transformative educational practices and the importance of energy literacy. Through geoparsing, it was possible to infer country mentions and case studies. These appeared to be largely skewed towards the English speaking countries and in particular the United States and United Kingdom, underpinning the urgency of diversifying research funding and fostering an open data culture. The insights gained from this scoping review underscore the potential of climate education to not only enhance knowledge but also to drive community engagement and policy initiatives, thus contributing to broader climate action efforts. In essence, it suggests fostering innovative educational practices for cultivating an active and informed society capable of addressing the pressing challenges posed by climate change. Importantly, this study calls for the integration of climate change education themes into climate policy-relevant assessment reports.