Moving beyond scientific knowledge: leveraging participation, relevance, and interconnectedness for climate education

Climate change requires a massive global response: individuals, communities, regions, and nations all need to make substantial change to current habits and behaviours. Education is an important part of changing habit and behaviour, yet most contemporary climate change education focuses primarily on individual’s knowledge about climate science, which research suggests has limited utility in supporting collective response to climate change. This article proposes a new focus on educational intervention that is sensitive to the shared need for rapid, collective impact. Drawing on socio-cultural learning theory and a review of research on climate change learning, we argue that interventions based on three core principles – participation, relevance, interconnectedness – are more likely to result in people taking steps to respond to climate change than interventions based on knowledge acquisition alone.