Scientists’ warnings and the need to reimagine, recreate, and restore environmental education

Abstract

Three decades have passed since approximately 1,700 scientists signed the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity highlighting severe environmental problems and trends affecting local and global communities. To reverse the situation, their 1992 Warning argued we need to change our behaviour. In 2017, a larger group issued a second consensus statement warning that the direction and rates of environmental change had worsened and remained unsustainable. Neither document, however, identified education as a key strategy in supporting the necessary behavioural changes that could address such trends. With this in mind, in this essay we argue that to avoid imperilling our future and the planet’s—and to achieve a just transition to sustainability—environmental education is a cornerstone for the social and environmental changes expected in such Warnings. We also argue that consensus on our environmental predicaments is not simply a matter for scientists; it must be supported in multiple spheres. This includes the humanities, arts, and social sciences, and wider society. Only then will contemporary calls by organisations such as UNEP and UNESCO that ‘environmental education be a core component of all education systems at all levels by 2025’, have a chance of gaining the multilateral and multileveled support the situation so urgently requires.

Keywords:

• UNESCO
• UNEP
• environmental education
• education for sustainable development
• scientists’ warning

Acknowledgements

This article is a side project of a collaborative writing initiative initiated by Jerónimo Torres-Porras and Jorge Alcántara-Manzanares (Universidad de Córdoba), Walter Leal Filho (Hamburg University of Applied Sciences) and Alan Reid (Monash University) in 2020. JTP and JAM sketched a framework for a commentary on Scientists’ Warnings initially, with WLH and AR then bringing this into conversation with educational concerns. In 2021, as a spinoff to that earlier work and the contributions of the writing team, AR then worked with JD, JAF and NMA to prepare a new manuscript for this journal’s audience, as presented here. The current authors fully acknowledge the earlier contributions of JTP, JAM and WLF to the development of the ideas presented here regarding the Warnings, noting too that JTP, JAM and WLF will co-author articles for their fields and communities on similar themes to further this writing project.

We also extend our appreciation to the work of Kendall, Ripple and the Alliance of World Scientists initiative for providing the impetus for this unfolding writing project.

Disclosure statement

Authors declare no competing interests.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The State of Finance for Nature report (UNEP 2021), also released to coincide with World Environment Day events, includes recommendations to invest 0.1% of global GDP each year to protect and restore ecosystems and avoid the breakdown of ecosystem services. With estimates of half of global GDP relying on high-functioning biodiversity, and a fifth of countries being at risk of their ecosystems collapsing due to lack of care, education, and pollution control, the report argues that a total investment of US$8.1tn is required to maintain the biodiversity and natural habitats vital to human civilisation. Fundamental to this, but not stated explicitly, is education, when it is argued (p.6) that: ‘In order to ensure that humanity does not breach the safety limits of the planetary boundaries, we need a fundamental shift in mindset, transforming our relationship with nature’. It is also implicated in calls for organisational learning, such as knowledge on diverse forms of ‘capital’ and a reorientation of financial sectors, public planning, project development, including in ‘scaling up’. However, the report’s optimization model for costs and investments screens out environmental education and training as a significant ‘asset’ or ‘scaling factor’ (p.49) from the final methodology and its assumptions, while the significance of this is not noted in the limitations section of the report (p.60).

2 As McCray (2019) remarks, Snow’s (1959) comments on the prevailing and productive cultures of knowledge production deliberately sought to contrast ‘humanities versus sciences’, to then lament ‘the inability of literary scholars and scientists to understand and communicate with one another’. This ‘was not just an intellectual loss, … but something that threatened the ability of modern states to address the world’s problems’ (unpaginated). McCray also observes shifts in recent decades from STEM (‘science, technology, engineering, and math’) to STEAM (where the A inserts the arts) education simply don’t appear ambitious enough or sufficient to our current times and challenges. We agree, particularly if being educated relies on the capacity to identify and harness ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘powerful ways of knowing’ (Carlgren 2020).

3 Other warnings are available. ‘Understanding the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’ (Bradshaw et al. 2021) includes Ripple as one of the co-authors. After reviewing aspects including the Sixth Mass Extinction, political impotence and failure to meet international goals (i.e. the SDGs), it argues (p.6) that to ‘change the rules of the game’: “The gravity of the situation requires fundamental changes to global capitalism, education, and equality, which include inter alia the abolition of perpetual economic growth, properly pricing externalities, a rapid exit from fossil-fuel use, strict regulation of markets and property acquisition, reigning in corporate lobbying, and the empowerment of women. These choices will necessarily entail difficult conversations about population growth and the necessity of dwindling but more equitable standards of living”. But again, while education now gets a mention, there is still no direct recognition or linking to environmental and sustainability education.

4 Table 1 of the UNESCO (2021a) report that was used as the basis for advocating ‘environmental education in all curriculum by 2025’ does not list ‘nature’ or ‘natural’ as an environment-related keyword, nor typical related concepts such as interdependence—a key term used in the first goal of the Tbilisi Declaration (i.e., part of the field’s DNA). If content analysis is to be used, these and other terms well-suited to content and construct searches, interpretation and analysis include futures, risk, uncertainty, challenges, systems, boundaries, place, habitat, and transformation. See Wals (2011) and Sterling (2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alan Reid

Alan Reid works at Faculty of Education, Monash University. He edits the international research journal, Environmental Education Research, and publishes regularly on environmental and sustainability education (ESE) and their research. Recent examples include editing Environmental Education: critical concepts in the environment, with Justin Dillon, which reviews 50 years of activity in this area. Alan’s interests in research and service focus on growing traditions, capacities and the impact of ESE research. A key vehicle for this is his work with the Global Environmental Education Partnership, and via eePRO Research and Evaluation. Find out more via social media, pages or tags for eerjournal.

Justin Dillon

Justin Dillon is Professor of Science and Environmental Education and Director of the Centre for Research in STEM Education, University of Exeter. Justin serves as President of the National Association for Environmental Education and is a trustee of the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom. He co-edited the first ever International Handbook on Research in Environmental Education, and currently edits Studies in Science Education. His research and development projects involve extensive work with schools, museums, science centres, aquariums and botanic gardens. Justin is an associate editor of Environmental Education Research.

Nicole Ardoin

Nicole M. Ardoin Emmett Family Faculty Scholar, holds a joint appointment in the Graduate School of Education and the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. She is the Sykes Family E-IPER Director of the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) in the School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences. Nicole’s research focuses on environmental behavior as influenced by environmental learning and motivated by place-based connections, in informal and community-based settings, including parks and protected areas, nature-based tourism programs, farmers markets, and other everyday-life settings. Nicole is an associate editor of Environmental Education Research.

Jo-Anne Ferreira

Jo-Anne Ferreira Professor Jo-Anne Ferreira is Head of School and Dean (Education) at University of Southern Queensland. Jo’s research interests are in online education and the sociology of education with a special interest in post-structuralist theories of identity, embodiment and power, in systems-based change, and in environmental and sustainability education. She has most recently led a decade-long research project on systems-based change as a strategy for embedding sustainability education in teacher education. Jo is an associate editor of Environmental Education Research.