ALLEA recently published a new report: “A snapshot of Climate Change Education Initiatives in Europe: Initial findings and implications for future Climate Change Education”. The document has been prepared by ALLEA’s Science Education Working Group and contains recommendations based on an on-line survey of existing initiatives complemented by educational research literature and the expertise of the scholars who conducted this work. We speak with Cliona Murphy, the chair of the working group who wrote the report. The preliminary findings were recently presented at the United Nations Climate Change conference COP25 in Madrid.
How did it come about that you started investigating existing climate change education initiatives across Europe?
Cliona Murphy: The climate crisis increases and demands urgent actions. At the same time, the Paris agreement from 2015 imposes obligations towards climate change education on the member states of the European Union. These two aspects sparked discussions amongst the Science Education Working Group about educational resources that are available in different European countries to support teaching and learning about climate change.
From our discussions it became apparent that while there appeared to be many climate change education resources and initiatives being throughout Europe, there wasn’t any available source detailing these initiatives; their overall aims, content, focus and pedagogical approaches etc. We believed that research that would collect information about the different initiatives would be useful in identifying high quality resources that could be disseminated throughout Europe. We also thought that this work might identify gaps in the resources and initiatives and that these gaps could be addressed in the development of future climate change education resources. That’s how we decided to develop and carry out the survey.
The ALLEA report states that Climate Change Education should focus more on mitigation, adaptation, and climate justice. Could you explain why those three elements should have a more prominent place in education, and how this could be implemented?
C. M.: Yes. In the survey we found that a very high percentage of the initiatives focussed on the causes of climate change and the science behind climate change, which of course are essential in understanding climate change. However, we noticed that considerably lower percentages of the initiatives focussed on mitigation and adaptation, which are instrumental if we are to overcome the challenges posed by the climate crisis. Knowledge about climate change is of course essential, but not sufficient in addressing climate change challenges if it is not coupled with knowledge of how to mitigate and adapt to these challenges.
In terms of ‘climate justice’, it is really important that our young people understand that mitigation is not only crucial for future generations but is also essential for current disadvantaged populations on whom climate change is having the biggest impact. Thus we questioned, for example, in the context of mitigation in developed countries, to what extent young people are being supported in their understanding about the role society today has to play in acting not only on their own interests but in the interest of others.
Knowledge about climate change is of course essential, but not sufficient in addressing climate change challenges if it is not coupled with knowledge of how to mitigate and adapt to these challenges.
That being said, we need to be very careful when teaching our young people about climate change that we don’t make them anxious and create a feeling of helplessness. It is important that climate change education resources and programmes adopt solution-oriented approaches that focus on collective actions as a means to decrease eco-anxiety while fostering a sense of agency amongst our young people.
What are the ALLEA Science Education Working Group’s plans for the future? Will this topic be further investigated or are you moving on to new subjects?
C. M.: The working group are very passionate about climate change education and very much see this scoping-survey as a first step in progressing climate change education throughout Europe. Our goal is to support effective teaching and learning about climate change that would result in our young people throughout Europe developing the requisite: content knowledge; scientific, critical thinking and problem-solving skills; and, attitudes towards mitigating climate change.
Our survey provides a snapshot, an initial insight, into some of the initiatives currently being rolled out in Europe. However, it’s only a first step. A more representative large-scale survey of climate change education initiatives is warranted to obtain a more thorough account of these initiatives. As a next step, we would like to conduct a larger scale more representative European survey to identify commonalities, gaps, and best practices in climate change education. The findings from this larger-scale survey could ultimately lead to the development of a set of criteria or a framework that would inform the development of future initiatives.
Our goal is to support effective teaching and learning about climate change that would result in our young people throughout Europe developing the requisite: content knowledge; scientific, critical thinking and problem-solving skills; and, attitudes towards mitigating climate change.
Our survey revealed that while there appears to be a good range of education resources for teachers, in comparison there appears to be fewer professional development courses to support teachers in effectively teaching about climate change. As teachers have a vital role in climate change education, they need to be supported so they develop the confidence and competence to effectively teach about climate change. To this extent the working group would like to ensure that high-quality professional development programmes are developed and made widely available for teachers.
As a third step it would make sense to gather research that would assess; the quality of climate change education professional programmes; the extent to which teachers are implementing professional development methodologies in their classrooms; and, most importantly the impact on their students’ understanding of and attitudes towards climate change.
The working group is also interested in a number of other areas in science education, but is currently focusing on issues around Education for Sustainable Development, International Large-Scale Studies of Achievement, STEM / STEAM Education, and Nature of Science Pedagogy.
Why Open Science Is Here to Stay
Openness is one of the defining characteristics of modern science and scholarship. The idea that there should be some secret esoteric knowledge reserved for initiates has long been banished from serious research and survives only in some non-academic fringe groups. Even research in industrial R&D facilities is now routinely published, if only in the form of patent applications. The one major and sad exception is of course some military and security research, and there are also a small number of cases where fully open science is not appropriate, for example, in environmental research to protect endangered species or in medical research to protect patient confidentiality.
The fundamental concept is noble and powerful. Ideas, theories, and their supporting intellectual frameworks should constitute a common good of all humanity, freely shared for our mutual enjoyment and benefit. This concept is anchored in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states, in article 27.1 that “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” This framing of science as a cultural activity from which nobody is excluded and to which everyone can contribute, and from which everyone can benefit without in any way reducing the benefit available to others, defines it as what economists term a pure public good.
The reality however is different. Large parts of scholarly publication have been captured by commercial bodies whose primary interest is shareholder value and not the common good. The sharing of data is partial, inconsistent, and inadequately resourced. Science is too often confused with innovation and valued only for its immediate utility. Openness is paid lip service, but is often not properly rewarded in research evaluations, funding decisions and career progression. If we want open science to realise its full potential, there is an urgent need to reform processes and attitudes as well as to invest in sustainable infrastructures and organisations to support it. The necessity of such change has been dramatically brought home by the COVID-19 pandemic, where the traditional structures of science have been exposed as too slow and sclerotic to deal with a rapidly changing scientific and policy landscape.
At the same time, however, we have to recognise that many features of the traditional system are there for good reasons, and that moving to a more open and agile system is not without risk. Managing change in a complicated and interconnected system is challenging and raises many issues, some legal, some ethical, some practical as well as more philosophical ones concerning the purpose, nature and conduct of scholarship itself. It is vital that the academic community actively participates in discussing these issues using the full range of analytic tools developed in our various disciplines as well as our lived experience as researchers.
Europe is not unique in this regard, and science being universal, this discussion has to be cognisant of the global context. However, it is also the case that some issues have a special salience within the European context. For all these reasons, ALLEA feels that it is appropriate to establish a special task force on Open Science to address these challenges, to allow ALLEA to respond in a coherent and timely manner to developments, and to amplify the voice of the European academies within this global debate.
Luke Drury, Chair of the ALLEA Open Science Task Force and ALLEA Board Member.
Why should mitigation, adaptation and climate justice be at the heart of education?
How did it come about that you started investigating existing climate change education initiatives across Europe?
Cliona Murphy: The climate crisis increases and demands urgent actions. At the same time, the Paris agreement from 2015 imposes obligations towards climate change education on the member states of the European Union. These two aspects sparked discussions amongst the Science Education Working Group about educational resources that are available in different European countries to support teaching and learning about climate change.
From our discussions it became apparent that while there appeared to be many climate change education resources and initiatives being throughout Europe, there wasn’t any available source detailing these initiatives; their overall aims, content, focus and pedagogical approaches etc. We believed that research that would collect information about the different initiatives would be useful in identifying high quality resources that could be disseminated throughout Europe. We also thought that this work might identify gaps in the resources and initiatives and that these gaps could be addressed in the development of future climate change education resources. That’s how we decided to develop and carry out the survey.
The ALLEA report states that Climate Change Education should focus more on mitigation, adaptation, and climate justice. Could you explain why those three elements should have a more prominent place in education, and how this could be implemented?
C. M.: Yes. In the survey we found that a very high percentage of the initiatives focussed on the causes of climate change and the science behind climate change, which of course are essential in understanding climate change. However, we noticed that considerably lower percentages of the initiatives focussed on mitigation and adaptation, which are instrumental if we are to overcome the challenges posed by the climate crisis. Knowledge about climate change is of course essential, but not sufficient in addressing climate change challenges if it is not coupled with knowledge of how to mitigate and adapt to these challenges.
In terms of ‘climate justice’, it is really important that our young people understand that mitigation is not only crucial for future generations but is also essential for current disadvantaged populations on whom climate change is having the biggest impact. Thus we questioned, for example, in the context of mitigation in developed countries, to what extent young people are being supported in their understanding about the role society today has to play in acting not only on their own interests but in the interest of others.
That being said, we need to be very careful when teaching our young people about climate change that we don’t make them anxious and create a feeling of helplessness. It is important that climate change education resources and programmes adopt solution-oriented approaches that focus on collective actions as a means to decrease eco-anxiety while fostering a sense of agency amongst our young people.
What are the ALLEA Science Education Working Group’s plans for the future? Will this topic be further investigated or are you moving on to new subjects?
C. M.: The working group are very passionate about climate change education and very much see this scoping-survey as a first step in progressing climate change education throughout Europe. Our goal is to support effective teaching and learning about climate change that would result in our young people throughout Europe developing the requisite: content knowledge; scientific, critical thinking and problem-solving skills; and, attitudes towards mitigating climate change.
Our survey provides a snapshot, an initial insight, into some of the initiatives currently being rolled out in Europe. However, it’s only a first step. A more representative large-scale survey of climate change education initiatives is warranted to obtain a more thorough account of these initiatives. As a next step, we would like to conduct a larger scale more representative European survey to identify commonalities, gaps, and best practices in climate change education. The findings from this larger-scale survey could ultimately lead to the development of a set of criteria or a framework that would inform the development of future initiatives.
Our survey revealed that while there appears to be a good range of education resources for teachers, in comparison there appears to be fewer professional development courses to support teachers in effectively teaching about climate change. As teachers have a vital role in climate change education, they need to be supported so they develop the confidence and competence to effectively teach about climate change. To this extent the working group would like to ensure that high-quality professional development programmes are developed and made widely available for teachers.
As a third step it would make sense to gather research that would assess; the quality of climate change education professional programmes; the extent to which teachers are implementing professional development methodologies in their classrooms; and, most importantly the impact on their students’ understanding of and attitudes towards climate change.
The working group is also interested in a number of other areas in science education, but is currently focusing on issues around Education for Sustainable Development, International Large-Scale Studies of Achievement, STEM / STEAM Education, and Nature of Science Pedagogy.
ALLEA Board Meeting June 2020
Permanent Working Group Intellectual Property Rights Meeting
Expert Workshop “Causality in health inequalities research”
ALLEA Board Meeting March 2020
Mediation and moderation in health inequalities research
“Social Inequalities in Health” Bicentennial Symposium
SAPEA launches a series of webinars on sustainable food systems
The challenges of creating a sustainable food system for Europe will be examined in a series of high-profile webinars in the second half of 2020 — including an analysis of changing consumer attitudes in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Co-hosted by Europe’s academies and other partners, the webinar series will explore different aspects of Europe’s food system following the publication of our major evidence review report, A sustainable food system for the European Union and the scientific opinion of the European Commission’s Chief Scientific Advisors.
Each webinar will be under an hour in length and feature high-profile speakers, including members of SAPEA’s working group on sustainable food systems and representatives of organisations working on related issues. The first event in the series, planned for Thursday 2 July, will focus on changes observed during the Covid-19 pandemic, and will be co-hosted by UK sustainability campaign organisation Hubbub.
Future webinars in the series, planned for the autumn, will examine the EU’s new Farm2Fork strategy (co-hosted with the EU Food Policy Coalition) and the role of agroecology and technology in sustainability (co-hosted with a European academy).
For more information visit SAPEA website.
1st SAPEA webinar “Covid-19 and our food: How is the current crisis affecting how we eat?”
2 July 2020, 15:00 (CEST)
Register now
PERITIA Call for Abstracts: Trust in Expertise in a Changing Media Landscape
The EU-funded research project PERITIA has published a call for abstracts on the topic “Trust in Expertise in a Changing Media Landscape”. Accepted papers will be discussed in an international conference in Berlin on 18-19 March 2021. The keynotes of the event include Prof Onora O’Neill (Cambridge), Prof Natali Helberger (Amsterdam), Prof Michael Latzer (Zurich), Prof Christoph Neuberger (Berlin). The project invites abstracts of up to 300 words and a short bio of up to 100 words by 1 September, 2020.
The conference will highlight the question of trust in a changing media landscape, addressing the following three general questions:
Possible topics may include (but are not restricted to):
Submission Details
This call solicits presentations and papers from a number of (inter)disciplinary fields, bringing together perspectives from media and communication studies, information science, public policy, philosophy, social and political sciences, and more. Papers will be selected on the basis of quality of content and suitability to the theme. The two day conference will feature up to 60 presentations in various panels and keynotes. Selected papers will be considered for publication in a special issue or edited volume.
This conference aims to foster the exchange of ideas across national and disciplinary borders between senior and junior researchers. We have therefore reserved limited funds for travel grants to support excellent contributions from early career scholars and scholars from the global south. Please indicate your interest when submitting your abstract.
PERITIA invites abstracts of up to 300 words and a short bio of up to 100 words by 1 September, 2020.
Abstracts should be sent to peritia@allea.org.
Information regarding acceptance should be available by early October 2020.
ALLEA is a partner in the PERITIA Consortium.