To achieve long-term sustainability individuals, groups, and organizations need to mitigate
climate change and adapt to the new environmental scenarios. Indeed, climate change is a process that
cannot be ignored in any way any longer. Not only it is happening everywhere, and the effects are more
noticeable every year, but it has also been happening for decades with an impact on every ecosystem
of the planet. This means that climate change is a fundamental issue that affects every person, group,
and organization.
Professionally, we need as much expertise as we can gather. More practitioners are needed
with experience in every field to help mitigate climate change as much as possible while facilitating
rapid adaptation to a progressively damaging climate change.
Climate change is caused by humans and human behavior, even if some issues seem
technological and environmental problems, the origin is still human behavior. Therefore, there is a
critical need for being able to count on behavioral experts that contribute to explaining current
behaviors. Additionally, behavior change experts who are able to motivate individuals, groups, and
organizations to engage in mitigation and adaptation behaviors are equally necessary.
To achieve this, a more comprehensive range of educational opportunities is needed. This
education must be included in vocational training and applied science universities. However, nothing
will have an impact as far-reaching as education about climate change for students during their
bachelor and master programs. The capacity of highly trained professionals with behavioral change
expertise can have a trickling-down effect that will benefit the whole world.
Because of how crucial education in climate change is, an urgent need is currently a pressing
matter to provide specialized education on how to understand and improve the sustainability behavior
of people, groups, and organizations. This need to increase both the amount and quality of
sustainability-related education is met with an insufficient amount of education resources being
offered.
Creating new courses or even programs on this topic is not a realistic possibility for many
institutions. In some cases, the development of new content might not be feasible due to local
difficulties, and in other cases, climate change might not be a preference whatsoever. Therefore, it is
crucial to offer alternatives to institutions that due to factors such as lack of local expertise, different
agendas, or the difficulties linked to generating new content cannot offer education on climate change
and behavior themselves. This education alternative should be easy to implement and adapt to the
specific programs.
The most straightforward contribution to facilitating education in climate change at bachelor
and master levels is offering online courses that can be imported. Additionally, to maximize the reach
of these courses, they should include content that can be learned in a self-guided manner. The PSYCLIC
project offers the latest content about climate change and human behavior. This material will be
available to be directly imported digitally at any university program. Additionally, it has a modular
structure that is self-guided by default.
However, the education resource that the PSYCLIC project offers will not make a meaningful
impact unless the target community (i.e., institutions that could offer education on the topic of climate
change and behavior but do not do so) is eager to use the education resources that the project will
offer.
To understand if the profile of scholars that the PSYCLIC project has as the target are ready and
kin on using what the project will offer, we reached other colleagues to explore the demands and
barriers for ready to use digital education material on climate change and behavior.ERASMUS+ / Projektname: Psychology and Climate Change - Digital Education / Projekt Akronym: PSYCLI
