Dear colleagues,

We invite you to contribute to the Special Issue “The Climate Competence in Education”, which will be published early in 2021 by Sustainability.

The climate change crisis has reached a global crisis point. It is no longer a remote event in time or space but at our door. We have now witnessed a decade of climate records, and this year, we have seen fires in California, Australia, Siberia, and the Amazon, while the  atlantic witnessed more than 26 storms in the summer. Record temperatures all over the world have made it clear that climate change is at our doorstep.

Social institutions need to respond to the global challenge, from individuals to families  all the way to local governments and international organizations. To achieve the decarbonization of  the economy by 2050, we need to promote deep transformation in society at all levels.

Although a large political consensus exists on the pivotal role of education in generating solutions for climate change, there are no concrete strategies for implementing the compromises of the Paris agreement in an emergency curriculum on climate change.

In this issue, we will explore the contributions of education for solutions to climate change. In particular, we will discuss the inclusion of climate change in the national curriculum and the different routes to make this possible.

We will address the characteristics and merits of a new competence: climate change competence. This competence might be a vehicle for including extensive work from the literature to produce a simple and comprehensive route for including this topic in the core of the educational system. We believe that this concept would help to arrange many of the attributes needed by society to supply a coherent response around a well-known concept in education, competence, which could be easily introduced within national legislation and scholarly systems.

In this issue, we will collect all investigations on education and sustainability, education and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and how educational experiences in  the classroom, centers and national and regional strategies can be included in a new competence that can be added to competence-based learning.

Dr. Camilo Ruiz
Dr. Fernando Martinez
Dr. Enzo Ferrari
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• climate change education (CCE)
• climate competence
• education for sustainable development (ESD)