Climate change education: A proposal of a category-based tool for curriculum analysis to achieve the climate competence

Abstract

Climate Change is the most important threat to our planet. The Paris Agreement of 2015 provides a strategy to reduce its impacts through decarbonization, but this pathway requires a deep change in the society. Education has been identified as a major tool for adaptation and mitigation in many international treaties, but a general framework or strategy to implement Climate Change Education is yet to be defined. To provide this framework we propose the introduction of a Climate Change competence. This concept will help to organize many of the attributes needed by society to produce a coherent response, around a well-known concept in Education such as the competence, which could be easily introduced in the national legislations and scholar systems. For this competence to be implemented, we need to assess how fit the current curriculum is or how it could be used to achieve the Climate Competence. For this we propose to develop an evaluation tool of the educational system, to assess the fitness or capabilities of a given curriculum to understand Climate Change.