Is climate change the ‘elephant in the room’ for outdoor environmental education?

Abstract

The impacts of climate change are undeniable, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to dispute the science. What is less clear is the role of outdoor environmental education in educating participants with the knowledge and motivation to act. Experiential programs that take students outdoors seemingly provide the ideal context to equip students with knowledge and skills to be the vital change agents that the world needs. If outdoor educators are unconvinced of the impacts of climate change, then recent impacts on outdoor programming and practices should call attention to the issue. Changing climatic factors include increased temperatures, droughts, increased severity and frequency of storms, bushfires and floods, and national park closures. The implications of such impacts have not been widely considered, and our research aims to elucidate these concerns. This article uses a systematic literature review to examine the prevalence of climate change as a focus for published research in JOEE and its predecessor, AJOE. We conducted a qualitative analysis of the abstract of every single peer-reviewed paper and six themes emerged from our analysis of these articles. Findings from this review indicate that there is not a substantive focus on climate change in refereed articles published in the journal as only 14 of the 251 peer-reviewed articles published in AJOE/JOEE mentioned climate change. We conclude that more research needs to be undertaken to ascertain how outdoor environmental educators can facilitate a climate change curriculum and how outdoor environmental education programs in Australia are impacted by climate change.