This paper sets out to develop key messages for the theory and practice of environmental education from a review of recent research literature on climate change communication (CCC) and education. It focuses on how learners of climate science understand messages on climate change, the communicative contexts for education on climate change, the barriers that can be found to public engagement with climate change issues, and how these barriers can be addressed. 92 peer-reviewed studies were examined. The analysis focuses on the goals and strategies of CCC, and how barriers can be addressed given the research findings on: (a) the content of CCC, (b) visualizations, (c) framing, (d) audience segmentation. The paper concludes that CCC and education need to address barriers to public engagement on several levels simultaneously. It recommends that scholars of environmental education focus critical attention on how practice addresses senses and spheres of agency; sociocultural factors; and the complexities of developing scientific literacy given the interpretative frames and prior understandings that are brought to bear by the public in non-formal education settings.

While increasing hopes are being attached to deliberate societal transformative change to achieve the targets of the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement, questions remain about whether and whereby such profound systemic change can be governed. This paper analyses how transformative changes are intended to be encouraged and achieved, where and when. The paper explores critical drivers and how they relate to leverage points at different places in the societal systems. The paper builds on a comprehensive sense-making analysis of scholarly literature, policy documents, including countries’ contributions to the Paris Agreement and national reviews of progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals, international news media and lay focus group discussions on five continents. There are great variations in how drivers were made sense of in the data. The many ongoing interacting transformations across societies involve different social, cultural, and political contexts, while the implementation of the 2030 Agenda also contains goal conflicts and unavoidable trade-offs. The paper highlights four categories of drivers as particularly important to consider in view of international transformation efforts: technological innovations, political economy redistribution, new narratives, and transformative learning. Four features are important for bringing clarity on how deliberate transformations can be encouraged: (1) the function of drivers in enabling and restricting transformations of societal systems characterised by detailed or dynamic complexity, (2) cultural and geographical contexts of transformations, (3) where in the systems the drivers are intended to intervene, and (4) the role of critical junctions in time, where transformative trajectories can branch out.

This paper explores social representations of climate change, investigating how climate change is discussed by Swedish laypeople interacting in focus group interviews. The analysis focuses on prototypical examples and metaphors, which were key devices for objectifying climate change representations. The paper analyzes how the interaction of focus group participants with other speakers, ideas, arguments, and broader social representations shaped their representations of climate change. Climate change was understood as a global but distant issue with severe consequences. There was a dynamic tension between representations of climate change as a gradual vs. unpredictable process. Implications for climate change communication are discussed.

This study explores sense-making about climate engineering among lay focus group participants in Japan, New Zealand, the USA and Sweden. In total, 23 qualitative focus group interviews of 136 participants were conducted. The analyses considered sense-making strategies and heuristics among the focus group participants and identified commonalities and variations in the data, exploring participants’ initial and spontaneous reactions to climate engineering and to several recurrent arguments that feature in scientific and public debate (e.g. climate emergency). We found that, despite this study’s wide geographical scope, heterogeneous focus group compositions, and the use of different moderators, common themes emerged. Participants made sense of climate engineering in similar ways, for example, through context-dependent analogies and metaphorical descriptions. With few exceptions, participants largely expressed negative views of large-scale deliberate intervention in climate systems as a means to address anthropogenic global warming.

Societal transformation is one of the most topical concepts in sustainability research and policy-making. Used in many ways, it indicates that nonlinear systematic changes are needed in order to fully address global environmental and human development challenges. This paper explores what sustainability transformations mean for lay focus group participants in Cabo Verde, China, Fiji, Sweden, and the USA. Key findings include: (a) Tightly linked to interpersonal relationships, sustainability was seen as going beyond the Sustainable Development Goals to include a sense of belonging; (b) transformations were framed as fundamental changes from today’s society, but most participants stated that transformation pathways need to splice new structures into the old; (c) new technologies are key engines of change. Yet, the most common drivers were awareness, education, and knowledge sharing; and (d) regardless of whether state-centric or decentralized governance was preferred, personal action was seen as essential. The focus groups displayed a shared understanding across the geographical settings; a common realization of profound sustainability predicaments facing societies across the world; and a desire for fundamental change towards a more sustainable way of life.

The literature on climate engineering, or geoengineering, covers a wide range of potential methods for solar radiation management or carbon dioxide removal that vary in technical aspects, temporal and spatial scales, potential environmental impacts, and legal, ethical, and governance challenges. This paper presents a comprehensive review of social and natural science papers on this topic since 2006 and listed in SCOPUS and Web of Science. It adds to previous literature reviews by combining analyses of bibliometric patterns and of trends in how the technologies are framed in terms of content, motivations, stakes, and recommendations. Most peer‐reviewed climate engineering literature does not weigh the risks and new, additional, benefits of the various technologies, but emphasizes either the potential dangers of climate engineering or the climate change consequences of refraining from considering the research, development, demonstration, and/or deployment of climate engineering technologies. To analyse this polarity, not prevalent in the literature on earlier emerging technologies, we explore the concept of dual high‐stake technologies. As appeals to fear have proven ineffective in spurring public engagement in climate change, we may not expect significant public support for climate engineering technologies whose rationale is not to achieve benefits in addition to avoiding the high stakes of climate change. Furthermore, in designing public engagement exercises, researchers must be careful not to steer discussions by emphasizing one type of stake framing over another. A dual high‐stake, rather than risk–benefit, framing should also be considered in analysing some emerging technologies with similar characteristics, for example, nanotechnology for pollution control. WIREs Clim Change 2015, 6:255–268. doi: 10.1002/wcc.333This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice