Blog post
How Climate Education Could Transform Every Subject
Enfys Lloyd
September 15, 2025
Over the past few weeks, students from Teach the Future and beyond have been meeting online to discuss how the climate crisis shows up – or doesn’t – in our schools and colleges. We looked across a wide range of subjects to think about how climate education could be embedded more meaningfully.
What we found was a set of shared frustrations: climate and nature are often siloed into certain subjects, touched on only briefly, or taught in ways that feel disconnected from students’ real lives. Yet, across every discussion, we explored opportunities to counter these issues and approach climate education in creative and empowering ways.
In English Literature, the potential for nature education is everywhere – from Plath’s poetry to The Handmaid’s Tale – but the climate crisis is rarely named outright. Often, whether it’s discussed at all depends on the teacher’s interest, leaving the majority of students to connect the dots themselves – if they’re even given the resources to do so. English Language, meanwhile, offers space for creative and nonfiction writing that can relate to climate and nature education, but students suggest that the tasks often feel abstract and disconnected. Students suggested making them feel more authentic, such as writing letters to MPs or creating articles that actually get shared.
Modern Foreign Languages offer even less. At GCSE, climate topics are siloed into tiny sections; at A Level, they vanish altogether. This feels like a huge missed opportunity; language teaching could help us understand how different cultures think about the environment, encouraging the empathy and cross-cultural cooperation we need for global climate action.
Above all, students felt storytelling is an underutilised tool in climate education. Literature, poetry and language can be used to connect statistics to human experience, helping to build the emotional understanding needed to care and act.
Unsurprisingly, Geography was seen as the subject most directly engaged with the climate crisis – but even here, teaching often misses the “small picture”. Students complained that the discussion of everyday human impacts is minimised, leading to a lack of empathy for those most affected by the climate crisis. As well as this, the divide between physical and human geography makes learning feel fragmented.
Biology and Chemistry lag further behind. Biology tends to prioritise human systems over plants and ecosystems, leaving students feeling disconnected from nature – A Level Biology students, in particular, agreed that the teaching of ecology felt very poor and disengaging. Chemistry mentions renewable energy or electric cars in passing, but rarely digs into sustainability, materials or the social impacts of production.
Students called for more integrated and solution-focused teaching, from fieldwork linking biology and geography to exploring the chemistry of soils and water. Outdoor and hands-on learning came up repeatedly as a way to make education more engaging, empowering and relevant.
In these subjects, climate topics only appear if students choose to pursue them in coursework. Engineering, for example, talks about material sustainability only in terms of cost as opposed to any genuine concern for the environment, while business case studies depend heavily on the teachers’ own interests.
Despite this, these subjects could be some of the most powerful for climate education: Design Technology and Engineering can equip students with the skills to invent future solutions; Business can highlight the role companies play in either fuelling or fighting the crisis; Art can inspire empathy, tackle eco-anxiety, and communicate ideas in ways statistics cannot.
Students stressed the need for coursework briefs and project opportunities that explicitly ask for sustainable, climate-conscious thinking. Framing these subjects as tools for climate action could help young people see their learning as directly relevant to their futures.
Maths is deeply connected to almost every subject – but education rarely shows this. Students felt maths should be taught less as abstract exercises and more as skills for life, with space to explore how statistics, modelling and computing can be applied to real-world problems like the climate crisis.
Interdisciplinary learning was seen as crucial here. Climate education is relevant to all subjects, but education is siloed, with syllabi that don’t “speak” to each other. Showing how maths underpins economics, science and even the humanities could open new ways of thinking.
Students also highlighted the lack of computer skills integrated into learning. Many leave school knowing the theory but unable to use technology in practical ways – something urgently needed for most job sectors today, not just climate.
Across all four meetings, some shared themes stood out:
Together, these insights show just how much potential there is for rethinking climate education. Every subject has a role to play in preparing young people for the climate crisis, not just Biology, Geography and those other subjects deemed “traditionally” associated with climate.
To see what this could look like in practice, check out our Curriculum for a Changing Climate project! Developed with subject experts, it reimagines each subject area with a focus on climate and nature education, using a “tracked changes” format to show exactly what needs updating.