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The human in geography

The human in geography

23 March 2026

Read time: 5mins

‘Alongside sharing resources and showcasing good existing practice, the campaign’s primary goal is to build public and professional consensus that every teacher, not just science and geography, needs to know how to help young people engage courageously with climate reality.’

Louise Edgington

How can we support young people as we teach hard truths about our planet?

I recently spent an hour with the wonderful geography teachers of the Girls Learning Trust in Wallington Girls School, south of London. Me, an educational psychologist, making the case that young people’s agency grows when children feel seen, heard, and emotionally held as we teach age-appropriate truths.

This is especially important in climate education, where the emotional load is significant and often unspoken. The message resonated. As one teacher put it:

‘We’re so focused on getting through all the content that we don’t make time for talking about how it makes us feel… we leave climate till the end of year 11 as it’s such a complex issue. We should put it at the beginning and give more space to consider how we feel.’

We considered the obstacles they encounter when trying to teach climate change and encourage sustainability:

Limited time and authority for sustainability leads

Many schools now have a sustainability lead, implementing a Climate Action Plan (‘CAP’ as per the DfE sustainability strategy, 2023), but the role is often squeezed into an already full timetable. There can be a difficulty in securing whole‑school or organisational approval for even modest changes. The risk of teacher burn-out here is very real.

I argued that, in truth, supporting young people starts with our own inner work. Unless teachers themselves feel well supported, and have time to process their own feelings, we risk projecting our fears into our teaching and can’t hold space for pupil concerns.

From a psychological perspective, a whole school commitment to the CAP sends pupils a strong signal: ‘We care about your future and we are taking steps to safeguard it. We are taking steps together that make a difference.’ This matters to the felt sense of safety at school and relations trust in our educators.

Conspiracy theories and inherited denial

Some pupils arrive in geography lessons with climate‑related conspiracy theories, often absorbed from family members or online spaces.

Climate psychology helps us here as we understand that there are deep psychology drivers underpinning the lure of messages like ‘climate change is a hoax’. We all want to be soothed into thinking ‘things will be ok’.

We sat with the discomfort of the delicate work of challenging misinformation without undermining family relationships. It requires patience, trust, and a commitment to critical thinking rather than confrontation or judgement.

Apathy and the gap between outrage and action

Another theme was the reported disconnect some students show between global events and personal behaviour. They may express outrage at political decisions, yet struggle to translate that understanding into everyday personal actions like recycling or reducing waste.

Here theories of social change may help us and others see our role as part of a collective global effort. Tiny actions influence others and add up to support for policy or market demand changes. What we do matters.

Deep concern for climate justice

For those young people who are engaged, the emotional weight is heavy. Some pupils are acutely aware that communities in the Global South, who have contributed least to climate change, are suffering the most.

The injustices are also felt across socio economic and gender lines too. Research shows that girls report higher levels of eco‑anxiety than boys, and globally they face disproportionate climate impacts (e.g. Hickman et al., 2021). In many regions, girls and women are responsible for water collection, walking further as drought intensifies, and are more vulnerable to displacement, early marriage, and loss of education during climate‑related crises (UNICEF, 2021).

Teachers also acknowledged that many families are navigating rising living costs. Sustainability can feel like a luxury when the immediate concern is heating a home or affording transport. This reality informs how we talk about personal responsibility in a sensitive and grounded way. Those who can do more have a responsibility to do so.

These points of tension aren’t uncommon and are precisely the rational for the Climate Majority Project’s Climate Courage Campaign. The campaign emphasises that courage is not the absence of fear, but the willingness to act alongside it. In the campaign we believe that:

Young people are living through climate disruption right now – not in some distant future.
Teachers want to help – but they haven’t been trained for this.
You can’t teach climate without helping students make sense of their responses to it.
Every teacher needs training in climate literacy, climate psychology and emotional work, facilitating intergenerational climate action, and nature connection – not just science and geography specialists.
Training every teacher and requiring school leaders to prioritise this is the most practical step government can take to prepare young people to thrive.

Alongside sharing resources and showcasing good existing practice, the campaign’s primary goal is to build public and professional consensus that every teacher, not just science and geography, needs to know how to help young people engage courageously with climate reality.

We’re starting with a call for enhanced teacher training and support in climate emotional literacy; sessions like the one at Wallington. If we hold space for both content and our emotions, we can help young people move through anxiety to agency, through overwhelm to courage. And in doing so, we honour the heart of geography: the experience of being human in a changing world.

References

Department for Education (2022) Sustainability and climate change: A strategy for the education and children’s services systems.
Hickman, C., Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R. E., Mayall, E. E., Wray, B., Mellor, C., & Van Susteren, L. (2021) Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: A global survey. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), e863–e873.
UNICEF (2021) The climate crisis is a child rights crisis: Introducing the Children’s Climate Risk Index. UNICEF.

Written by Dr Louise Edgington, a climate specialist educational psychologist and ex-physics teacher, working to bring climate psychology into education and the broader movement towards sustainability and adaptation.

She advises the Imperial Climate Cares Compass project expert panel, the Climate Majority Project’s Climate Courage Campaign and the Climate Minds Coalition steering committee.

Louise gives climate psychology talks, holds support spaces and shares resources via her freelance practice, ClimatEdPsych and through Climate Psychology Alliance.