For about two years, the climate youth activism initiative Fridays for Future has addressed climate emergency, receiving considerable attention because of their consistent protests every week in many different locations worldwide. Based on empirical studies in Austria and Portugal, this paper investigates the motivations of students to participate in the movement and the solutions proposed by young activists to fight against climate emergency. Moreover, we discuss the integration of climate change activism into ESD (education for sustainable development) and transformative learning processes, and how this enables environmental citizenship. The results of the studies reveal that emotions and feelings of solidarity and collective aims are motives to participate in the strikes. The young activists sometimes propose innovative and sometimes radical solutions to climate emergency. Both demonstrations and exhibitions as forms of bottom-up climate activism initiatives contribute to engagement in political dialogue and scientific knowledge transfer. They can be seen as “triggers of change” for transformative learning.

The expert-driven and normative character of sustainability education aims to promote societal transformation and global change. While some authors underline the ethical claims of education, others have criticized that there is a problematic tendency to prescribe certain actions beyond ethical education. The article aims to provide an empirical contribution, including students’ and teachers’ perspectives, and geography textbooks, to the debate. Based on the results of an empirical study with 1001 secondary school students in Austria and Germany, we discuss the “ethical turn” and the moral code in sustainability education. The questionnaires are completed with students’ drawings, qualitative interviews with geography teachers and an analysis of geography textbooks. We argue that most students have a precise idea what sustainability and sustainable behavior means, but they harbor right-wrong binary perceptions of sustainable lifestyles. Many students lack knowledge of the interdependence of consumption and production networks, which impedes the understanding of complex sustainability patterns. Therefore, we recommend pluralistic and interconnected perspectives in sustainability, in the frame of school geography. A more democratic classroom contributes to develop an own moral compass. Additionally, passion and participatory approaches can help students reflect on their affective relationships with consumer goods and consider alternative consumption-production paradigms.

This article critiques the way the topic of meat and its consumption is addressed in geography education within the remit of education for sustainable development (ESD). We argue that current approaches perpetuate normative food discourse by: (a) framing participation in the food system solely in terms of consumption; (b) simplifying and moralizing food systems as ‘good’ or ‘bad’; and (c) largely omitting animals from a discussion of meat and agriculture. As a result, students learn that their role is to consume ‘good’ not ‘bad’ meat, but are ill-equipped to analyse the political–economic, cultural and affective dimensions of food. Meat and consumption topics, although rarely addressed, fall under the broader pedagogy of ESD. Although emancipatory approaches to ESD explore contradictions inherent in and personal aspects of sustainability, ESD in practice often leads to binary schemata of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Based on our qualitative review of geography curricula in Austria and Germany (Lower Saxony and Bremen), we find that they neglect meat production and consumption, but that these subjects can be addressed within broader topics about sustainability and agricultural land use. Interviews with secondary school teachers and students indicate that ESD ignores the interpersonal, relational and more-than-human elements of food systems. However, we show that students still rank animal welfare as an important component of sustainability. This indicates that they are influenced by education beyond institutional settings and, furthermore, highlights opportunities for making students aware of the visceral (dis)connections they make between taste and political economy. Finally, we suggest future directions for ESD in order that these links can be explored, probing students to develop their own ethics of the gut.

Forest ecosystems play a fundamental role in mitigating global environmental changes. The development of environmentally sound behavior, and inter- and intragenerational equity can help counteract these global changes. One type of formal and non-formal environmental education is forest education, which aims to promote the achievement of sustainable development in forest-related ecosystems. We conducted an empirical study among forest educators in Austria, using a mixed-method approach, to investigate the potential of forest education to promote education for environmental citizenship. Our findings suggest that forest education and encounters with nature can lead to increased self-responsibility and contribute to critically reflect experience-based changes in behaviour. In conclusion, forest education is a useful tool for environmental citizenship education that contributes to improved understanding of forest ecosystems and non-anthropocentric perspectives for future development. However, forest education lacks funding, integration into formal education curricula, and the harmonization of framework conditions in non-formal education.

The geopolitical ecology of New Caledonia: territorial re-ordering, mining, and Indigenous economic development