Title: Exploring the climate literacy of high school students for better climate change education

Authors: Jing Wu; Yoshiki Otsuka

Addresses: Tokyo City University, 3-3-1 Ushikubonishi, Tsuzuki-ku, Yokohama, 224-8551, Japan; Center for Environmental Education and Communications, Ministry of Ecology and Environment, No. 1 Yuhuinanlu, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China ' Tokyo City University, 3-3-1 Ushikubonishi, Tsuzuki-ku, Yokohama, 224-8551, Japan

Abstract: To address climate change issues, international community is facing an overwhelming challenge: to create a climate-literate population by educating citizens. This study explores high school students' cognition, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour in relation to climate change, based on a questionnaire survey of 657 high school students from Shanghai. The findings reveal that misconceptions and biased understandings of climate change persist; climate-related knowledge and attitudes are weakly associated with behaviour. However, the element of 'relevance', including a belief in individual lifestyle, appears to be actively linked to behaviour. As an initial investigation of climate literacy in mainland China, the results are expected to increase the existing knowledge of climate literacy and education, from both conceptual and geographical perspectives.

Keywords: climate literacy; climate change education; CCE; high school students; misconception; relevance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGW.2021.112894

International Journal of Global Warming, 2021 Vol.23 No.2, pp.151 - 168

Received: 11 Mar 2020
Accepted: 17 Jul 2020
Published online: 08 Feb 2021 *

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