Education in international climate pledges – identifying education framings in countries nationally determined contributions (NDCs)

Abstract

Although education is acknowledged as an important tool to address climate change, only some countries refer to education within their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Using a mixed-methods approach, we explore the question of how countries frame education within their climate pledges. First, we examine NDCs with a discourse network analysis (DNA) to identify country framings of education and climate change and potential discourse coalitions among countries. Education is most often referred to as an instrument to adapt to climate change and to a lesser extent as an instrument to mitigate climate change. Second, we use a regression analysis to complement the DNA results. We find that countries with a higher exposure to climate change impacts are more likely to mention education, which explains the prevalence of the adaptation framing. Moreover, we find that countries with a higher GDP per capita are less likely to include education within their NDCs. These results confirm the traditional divide between Annex 1 and non-Annex 1 countries also with regard to education in NDCs.

Keywords:

• Climate change education
• nationally determined contributions (NDCs)
• United Nations framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC)
• global climate policy
• discourse network analysis (DNA)

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS:

• SDG 13: Climate action

Acknowledgements

We thank Susanne Helm for her research assistance on this study and the five anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 If countries had already submitted an updated or revised NDC, the most recent version was used. The European Union (EU) submitted one NDC for all its previously 28 member states.

2 While the DNA allows to create other networks as well, such as congruence networks that link actors or concepts based on their links to the same concepts or actors respectively, we chose affiliation networks for our analysis to visualize which countries used the same concepts.

3 In the case of skewed data, a log transformation can help to fulfil the requirements of normality and homoscedasticity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the German Research Foundation under grant number KO 4997/4-1, FOR 1745.