Environmental and sustainability education in teacher education: Canadian perspectives

This symposium examines Canadian perspectives on environmental and sustainability education in teacher education (ESE-TE) through the newly published Springer book volume titled, Environmental and Sustainability Education in Teacher Education: Canadian Perspectives (2019). The book’s contributors, from diverse faculties of education across Canada, employed a range of research methods in exploring various aspects of Environmental and Sustainability Education in Teacher Education (ESE-TE). The book includes the results of empirical and non-empirical studies, including case studies, mixed methods studies, self-study and narrative inquiry, as well as theoretical, conceptual and philosophical inquiries on ESE-TE. The book volume concludes that ESE-TE in Canada depends on the determined, persevering and passionate efforts of faculty members working in varied contexts while exhibiting a fair degree of autonomy. While provincial policy directives for ESE-TE are the exception rather than the norm, the degree of autonomy that post-secondary instructors enjoy could be further supported and strengthened by consistent policy directives that help further local curriculum development by faculty members representing different curricular areas. Additional empirical research is needed to identify specific factors—including a) approaches employed in Canadian ESE-TE programs, b) theoretical frameworks informing such approaches, c) curricular emphases and outcomes implemented in these programs, and d) experiences of ESE-TE students, instructors, administrators and policy-makers—that facilitate or hinder the enhancement of ESE-TE.

The National Roundtable on Environmental & Sustainability Education in Pre-Service Teacher Education, which took place in June 2016 at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, was a remarkable event in Canadian teacher education history. This National Roundtable brought together key educational stakeholders to discuss the state of Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) in Canada and to create an action plan for enhancing ESE nationwide. National Roundtable participants, which included faculty, researchers, teachers, community educators, and policy-makers, engaged in a large-scale collaborative inquiry process in which they discussed, debated, and analyzed past and current pedagogical practices; structural, programmatic, and economic challenges; theoretical and other explanatory frameworks; and critical areas of the field in need of further research. This chapter documents and reflects on the National Roundtable as indicative of the growing interest in Environmental and Sustainability Education in Teacher Education (ESE-TE) and discusses some of the impacts this event may have had on ESE-PTE in Canada.

The purpose of this article is to examine how signifiers and empty signifiers may contribute to the mainstreaming of environmental and sustainability education in teacher education. We argue that the moniker of environmental and sustainability education is an empty signifier in that it fails to convey meaning about what it signifies. Tracing the history of the pre- sustainability, sustainability, and post-sustainability field signifiers, and their respective sub- field signifiers (e.g., environmental education and education for sustainable development), we conduct a philosophical inquiry, augmented by a modified form of semiotic analysis, to expose the degree to which these signifiers are empty. The limitations and benefits of empty signification are explored through philosophical interpretation. Implications of empty signifier limitations are considered in teacher education and the manner in which they may contribute to the unsuccessful mainstreaming of environmental and sustainability education in teacher education. We conclude that a core or compulsory environmental and sustainability education course should be mandated in teacher education to ensure that all teacher candidates receive the education they require to educate future generations of children to live well on Earth.

New physical science behind climate change: What does IPCC AR6 tell us?

Environmental and sustainability issues prevail in modern society. Southern Africa, where this study is based, is one of the regions most at risk from intersecting issues of climate health risk, and poverty-related ills. Education has the potential to facilitate catalytic transformation of society through development of understandings of these intersecting environment and sustainability concerns, and to support engagements in more sustainable social practices oriented towards the common good. This requires a rethinking of education within a wider common good frame. It also has implications for how quality education is considered. However, little is said of how this could be done, especially in teacher education. The paper shares two cases of teacher educators' change project experiences, as they emerged via professional development support and the mediatory processes applied in courses conducted by the Southern African Development Community Regional Environmental Education Programme (SADC REEP) aimed at enhancing professional capacity of teacher educators and other environmental educators for mainstreaming environment and sustainability education (ESE)1. These courses are framed using a change project approach, and involve teacher educators as main participants. In-depth data were generated from interviews with two teacher educators, their assignment write-ups, and observations of their teacher education practice. Realist social theory, particularly the principle of emergence, was used to trace the emergence of change in teacher education practice. Sociocultural learning theory was used to explain mediation of learning-oriented changes in teacher education practice. We illustrate how the change project model and approach contributed to mediating change in practice, showing emergent attributes of capacity for mainstreaming ESE and elements of a concept of quality education among course participants oriented towards the common good. In conclusion, we argue that ESE seems to be a sensitising construct for initiating and sustaining change for ESE in teacher education. In addition, the change project has proved to be a potential vehicle for mainstreaming the notion and practice of ESE into social systems and teacher education practices. We argue that reflexive ESE praxis provides a sensitising focus, initiating quality education with humanising properties necessary for the common good.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present education as a driver of transformation amid increasing environmental challenges and inequality. This study maps the global research landscape connecting environmental education and sustainable development through a bibliometric analysis of 2139 English-language articles and reviews in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC; 1990–2024). It identifies leading outlets, institutions, countries/regions, and thematic structures, revealing three growth phases: exploratory (1990–2000), consolidation (2001–2015), and SDG-era expansion (2016–2024). Keyword networks emphasize environmental education, sustainability, ESD/EfS/EEfS, climate change, pro-environmental behavior, curriculum, and teacher education. Geography acts as a bridging discipline, strengthening spatial thinking, place-based inquiry, and local–global linkages. Alignment with SDGs was strongest for Goals 4 and 12–15, whereas Goals 5, 10, 16, and 17 remained underrepresented, revealing equity and governance gaps. Building on International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education (IRGEE) 1992–2009 themes, the analysis highlights continuity in teacher education, sustainability, and GIS/digital tools, alongside post-2010 shifts toward interdisciplinary, SDG-led, future-focused pedagogies oriented toward problem-solving. These findings have practical implications for curriculum design, assessment, and teacher learning, offering a concise, data-rich roadmap of research trends, gaps, and future directions for environmental and sustainability education.

Studies of the global mean surface temperature trend are typically conducted at a single (usually annual or decadal) time scale. The used scale does not necessarily correspond to the intrinsic scales of the natural temperature variability. This scale mismatch complicates the separation of externally forced temperature trends from natural temperature fluctuations. The hiatus of global warming since 1999 has been claimed to show that human activities play only a minor role in global warming. Most likely this claim is wrong due to the inadequate consideration of the scale-dependency in the global surface temperature (GST) evolution. Here we show that the variability and trend of the global mean surface temperature anomalies (GSTA) from January 1850 to December 2013, which incorporate both land and sea surface data, is scale-dependent and that the recent hiatus of global warming is mainly related to natural long-term oscillations. These results provide a possible explanation of the recent hiatus of global warming and suggest that the hiatus is only temporary.

Climate change impact of livestock CH4 emission in India: Global temperature change potential (GTP) and surface temperature response

There is evidence that a natural control system influences global atmospheric surface temperature (Leggett and Ball 2020). The present paper sets up and tests a hypothesis concerning the physical makeup of the sequential elements of the control system and its outcomes. The final outcome that the control system influences is defined as global atmospheric surface temperature. The terms used for the control system element types in the hypothesis are, in sequence: leading element, controller and actuator. Actuators are hypothesised to affect, in turn, the final outcome – either directly, or via penultimate outcomes. The existence of the control system is evidenced by demonstration of statistically significant one-way Granger causality across each step of the hypothesised control system sequence. Evidence is presented that the leading element of the control system, represented by the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, is the global biosphere. The biosphere as a control system has previously been referred to as Gaia (Lovelock and Margulis 1974). A fourth, second-derivative, term is found to enhance the Proportional, Integral and Derivative process terms of the control system shown in Leggett and Ball (2020). The main actuators of the control system found are shown to be wind speed and cloud cover. Cloud cover is shown to influence the final outcome, global surface temperature, directly. It and wind speed also influence the penultimate outcomes found, those of enhanced ocean heat uptake and enhanced outgoing longwave radiation. These together lead to control system output to the final outcome, global atmospheric temperature. Overall, evidence for the activity of the control system is shown to be present across many major physical dimensions of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Teachers' Sense of Efficacy: An Important Factor in School Improvement

In the Comment by Nuccitelli et al., they make many false and invalid criticisms of the CFC-warming theory in my recent paper, and claim that their anthropogenic forcings including CO2 would provide a better explanation of the observed global mean surface temperature (GMST) data over the past 50 years. First, their arguments for no significant discrepancy between modeled and observed GMST changes and for no pause in recent global warming contradict the widely accepted fact and conclusion that were reported in the recent literature extensively. Second, their criticism that the key data used in my recent paper would be "outdated" and "flawed" is untrue as these data are still used in the recent or current literature including the newest (2013) IPCC Report and there is no considerable difference between the UK Met Office HadRCUT3 and HadRCUT4 GMST datasets. The use of even more recently computer-reconstructed total solar irradiance data (whatever have large uncertainties) for the period prior to 1976 would not change any of the conclusions in my paper, where quantitative analyses were emphasized on the influences of humans and the Sun on global surface temperature after 1970 when direct measurements became available. For the latter, the solar effect has been well shown to play only a negligible role in global surface temperature change since 1970, which is identical to the conclusion made in the 2013 IPCC Report. Third, their argument that the solar effect would not play a major role in the GMST rise of 0.2°C during 1850–1970 even contradicts the data and conclusion presented in a recent paper published in their Skeptical Science by Nuccitelli himself. Fourth, their comments also indicate their lack of understandings of the basic radiation physics of the Earth system as well as of the efficacies of different greenhouse gases in affecting global surface temperature. Their listed "methodological errors" are either trivial or non-existing. Fifth, their assertion that "the climate system takes centuries to millennia to fully equilibrate" is lack of scientific basis. Finally, their model calculations including an additional fitting parameter do not reduce the discrepancy with observed GMST data even after their adjustments. Instead, their modeled results give a sharp GMST rise over the past 16 years, which obviously disagrees with the observed data.

Environmental education (EE) and education for sustainable development (ESD) pedagogies are intricate, and to enhance learning, teacher education has to be innovative in teaching approach. This article investigates how the change project approach enhances project-based learning in practice. The investigation is based on teacher education programmes in Botswana teacher education institutions (colleges of education) where a few teacher educators were introduced to Education for Strong Sustainability and Agency (ESSA) change projects. Preliminary results of the change projects’ evaluation indicate that change project ideas were enthusiastically accepted by teacher-educators and students across the teacher education colleges in Botswana. This research is a follow-up to change project implementation and its outcomes in two teacher education institutions in Botswana. It is framed within a project-based learning approach in teacher education. Data were generated through site visit observations and interviews with teacher-educators and studentteachers. The outcome indicated the viability of project-based learning (PBL) as an appropriate approach to transformative pedagogies for ESD in teacher education. The PBL approach is recommended for teacher training education to facilitate strong sustainability and agency among student-teachers. Key words: project-based learning, change project, ESD, environmental education, teacher education.

Purpose: Correlation study of long-term seasonal variations of intensity of the global electromagnetic (Schumann) resonance in the Earth-ionosphere cavity and the air temperature for the African center of the global thunderstorm activity.
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\nDesign/methodology/approach: The correlation analysis of the time series was used. By using the 13-year data (since 2002 till 2015) of monitoring the natural ELF noise at the Ukrainian Antarctic Vernadsky station, the seasonal variations in intensity of the first Schumann resonance mode were derived, driven by the lightning activity in the African thunderstorm center. The average air temperature of the African continent over the same period was estimated from the data collected by the global network of meteorological stations. The area of maximum thunderstorm activity in Africa was approximated by a simple geometric figure. The correction was made for the source distance (the lightning discharges) when estimating the power of the first resonant maximum in the ELF signal. A stable relationship between the air temperature and the thunderstorm activity at the African continent was established as a result of correlation processing of seasonal variations in the air temperature and the field intensity.
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\nFindings: A one month lag between the annual maximum resonance intensity was found with regard to the maximum of air temperature relevant to the delay in the formation of thunderstorms during transition from the dry to the rainy seasons in Africa. The cross-correlation coefficient increases from 0.58 (without compensation) to 0.76 (delay compensated) when this delay is accounted for by the relevant shift of temperature variations.
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\nConclusions: The technique developed can be used in finding the connection between the lightning activity of other thunderstorm centers and the corresponding regional temperature conditions. Such an approach might be used in developing the concept of Schumann resonance records as a “global thermometer”.

Environmental and sustainability education in teacher education: Canadian perspectives - Douglas D. Karrow and Maurice DiGiuseppe, Canada: Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

This study aimed at assessing the implementation of environmental and sustainability education by Robe College of Teacher Education staff in Oromia Regional State, Ethiopia. The study sought to assess (1) staff perception towards environmental and sustainability education; (2) teaching strategies used by teachers while implementing environmental and sustainability education (3) environmental issues addressed during environmental and sustainability education; and, (4) factors hindering the implementation of environmental and sustainability education. A mixed research methods were employed to collect data for the study. Household survey, key informant interview and personal observation were the sources of data. Five management committee members, thirty teachers selected from all the departments, and five work team leaders were included in the sample. Descriptive statistics (frequencies, percentages, mean and standard deviation) was employed for data analysis using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) software version 20. Result revealed that although the staff had positive perception towards environmental issues, and there were some effort to create awareness; respondents’ understanding was found to be low, and practices of environmental measures had great variations. The interview and observation results were consistent with the quantitative findings. In short, the result implies that the staff need to be better familiarized with the notion of environment and sustainability; the teacher education curriculum needs to be revisited. Besides, there should be an effective law enforcement mechanism for effective implementation of environmental activities.