Environmental education

The goal of environmental education is ‘to develop a world population that is aware of, and concerned about, the environment and its associated problems, and which has the knowledge, skills, attitudes, motivations, and commitment to work individually and collectively toward solutions of current problems and the prevention of new ones.’

Environmental education is not only used in the academic context, in the press, or in civil society organizations, but also in the public sphere. This topic is usually debated in spaces of governmental power and in international organizations, it is also often present in national and international environmental policies.

It is related to an interdisciplinary process—that is necessary from the social point of view—to bring humans closer to nature and to allow them to understand the existing interdependent relations in the development of sustainable societies. Environmental education must aim to establish environmental awareness by incorporating critical thinking and training for environmental action.

As a result, the term is also associated to a transformative process. ‘Environmental education is EDUCATION in all caps, it is learning and service with the intention of changing reality. Environmental education is committed to transforming our way of life into a society that is more just and ecologically balanced, and to a transition towards eco-social education. It is a process that proposes a new world vision based on an eco-social ethical framework where people fully develop their abilities and skills and adapt their activities to the principles of eco-dependence and interdependence with the biosphere’ (Gutiérrez Bastida, 2019:12).

The transformative process that results from environmental education must go beyond isolated environmental problems to address them systematically based on a global and integrated approach. Environmental education must be an empowering tool to face the systemic crisis and the global crisis, and to place life on this planet in the centre.

With this in mind, experts and civil society organizations opt for terms such as ecological and social education, eco-social education, or education for sustainable development. Another term that has gained popularity is education for sustainability, proposed by UNESCO in the Earth Summit which took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. According to UNESCO, this concept is more comprehensive because it studies the causes of the environmental crisis and the multiple ways to tackle the necessary processes of improvement and social transformation. Currently, however, environmental education is the most recognized and accepted term internationally.