Cross-Country Comparison of the State of Climate Education

• In Event: Highlighted Session: The Global State of Climate Education: Tracking Policies, Knowledge, and Progress

Proposal

To address the broad data and information gap about climate communication and education (CCE) globally, the MECCE Project developed a suite of 15 indicators whose metrics provide a basis for assessing important aspects of CCE. Following a comprehensive indicator development approach (Redman et al., under review), the Project evaluated hundreds of potential data sources based on criteria such as potential impact, reliability, validity, geographic coverage, temporal scope, accessibility, cost, and data disaggregation. In some cases existing data were re-purposed to capture particular aspects of CCE; in other cases, new data sets were developed with specific purposes in mind. Several new datasets were developed in collaboration with partners (e.g., UNESCO, the International Federation of Libraries and Library Associations, Clarivate, UN:CC Learn, Teachers College). All datasets were systematically transformed into communicable and comparable indicators aligned with international agreements (UNFCCC, SDG 4.7, 13.3). This presentation reviews results from all CCE global indicators, highlighting cross-national variation and, where possible, over time changes, and discusses how indicators can inform benchmarking and target setting in the future.

The presentation will summarize the comprehensive analytical approach applied to all CCE indicators. This includes: calculating descriptive statistics, comparing means of each region to the mean of the other countries to identify significant variation, reviewing correlations among CCE indicators, and exploring characteristics of the countries (e.g., geographical region, income level, climate vulnerability) that predict which counties are doing better or worse than expected on each indicator. In addition, an exploratory analysis of the relationship between the indicators was carried out by calculating the pairwise Pearson correlations between all 15 (105 comparisons). The presentation will highlight five indicators with data at multiple time points to view trends over time. Finally, overall country scores were calculated and a similar analysis to above was applied. For the regression, the country characteristics were converted to z-scores and via a stepwise process the most parsimonious model (least variables) that explained the most variance was determined.

The presentation highlights the six CCE indicators related to climate education and training. The analysis suggests that the countries doing best in climate education vary substantially by indicator and climate, environment and sustainability themes are not well integrated in formal education policies and curricula, particularly TVET laws and policies, and non-formal education. Relationships between this subset of CCE indicators with other indicators and country characteristics will be discussed. Finally the presentation will touch on overall findings from the complete set of indicators.

Authors

• Aaron Redman, Monitoring and Evaluating Climate Communication and Education MECCE Project

• Aaron Benavot, University at Albany-State University of New York

• Marcia McKenzie