Environmental Education: A Tool for Building Citizenship in the Face of Climate Change

Abstract

The relationship between society and the environment, given its degree of complexity, outlines a new concept of environment: a set of multiple physical and natural elements, as well as social and economic ones, in permanent interaction with the individual and with a community attached to a given territory, within which activities of all kinds unfold, primarily aimed at the survival of the human species and the necessary adaptations to climate change. In this sense, it becomes necessary to approach Environmental Education as a tool for life and a space for deep reflection on social changes and their effects on the environment, since it encompasses multiple dimensions — biological, social, environmental, ethical, hydrological, and climatological. Understood in this way, Environmental Education becomes a tool for confronting the current disparity we see in the development and evolution of environmental and human systems, which reveals the lack of a shared principle around which to build an environmentally critical citizenry with responsible actions to drive behavioral change.