Climate Change is the most important threat to our society and all species on Earth. Large alterations in the climate are affecting every aspect of our society and in order to limit this impact we must decarbonize the economy before 2050. Although science presents solid evidence on the magnitude of the problem and outlines precisely the consequences, people do not act accordingly and do not consider this issue a priority for their survival. The reason behind this paradox might be a non-appropriate Social Representation of Climate Change in society as the Social Representation conditions and forms the response of the society. In this paper, we extend previous investigations of how this Social Representation is formed in order to find ways to improve it through a Massive Online Open Course on the Science of Climate Change. Using a validated questionnaire, we investigated the knowledge dimension of the Social Representation of Climate Change in a group of students of a MOOC on Climate Change. A pre- and posttest revealed general improvements in all the categories that were considered in this study. A detailed analysis showed different degrees of improvement for different groups, providing new insights in the efficiency of knowledge-based online courses. Well designed Massive Online Open Courses, based on scientific evidence, targeted to the general public might improve the Social Representation of Climate Change, which may in turn trigger awareness and an effective mobilization to address this important and urgent topic.

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Educational gardens are powerful outdoor learning environments to address the subject of climate change and foster climate action. Using an online questionnaire, this study examines the influence of the main sociodemographic and academic factors, and the role of connectedness to nature, on the perception of educational gardens as contexts of climate change education (CCE) among Spanish preservice teachers (PSTs). The sample consisted of 889 PSTs enrolled in 9 university campuses of Spain. The statistical analyses performed evidenced that women are more likely to use educational gardens than men and that there is a progressive decrease in the positive perception of PSTs about the usefulness of gardens for CCE as the educational level at which they are being trained increases. Statistics also revealed that the variable connectedness to nature and the rating of the importance of educational gardens in CCE are not significantly related. Nevertheless, the Mann–Whitney U test indicated that PSTs who scored higher on connection to nature wished to broaden their knowledge of sustainable agriculture and, thus, connectedness to nature could be considered a predictor of environmental attitudes, each influencing the other. Based on these findings, recommendations for PSTs’ training in the CCE context are provided.

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Climate Change is the most important threat to our planet. The Paris Agreement of 2015 provides a strategy to reduce its impacts through decarbonization, but this pathway requires a deep change in the society. Education has been identified as a major tool for adaptation and mitigation in many international treaties, but a general framework or strategy to implement Climate Change Education is yet to be defined. To provide this framework we propose the introduction of a Climate Change competence. This concept will help to organize many of the attributes needed by society to produce a coherent response, around a well-known concept in Education such as the competence, which could be easily introduced in the national legislations and scholar systems. For this competence to be implemented, we need to assess how fit the current curriculum is or how it could be used to achieve the Climate Competence. For this we propose to develop an evaluation tool of the educational system, to assess the fitness or capabilities of a given curriculum to understand Climate Change.