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.