Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review | DOI: 10.13060/csr.2026.028

Civic Education in the Context of the Challenge of Climate Change

Slavomír Lesňák ORCID..., Radim Štěrba
Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

The article presents the challenges of civic education and a civic upbringing in the era of the transforming of society in response to climate change. These challenges include not only support for mitigation and adaptation measures but also support for maintaining or deepening democratic processes and institutions. Following the UNESCO call for educational transformation (2021), responsible civic education was defined as education that leads students to support pro-climate measures (a shared truth and a vision of the future) but also to embrace democratic civil attitudes. According to UNESCO, education should lead to peaceful activism that criticises and confronts the power structures that disrupt or prevent shared truths about a possible future. The authors therefore describe the transformations in civil disobedience (CD) and theoretical reflections on CD that appreciate its importance and potential for promoting pro-climatic measures. They also present other civil approaches and examples of addressing the climate crisis, specifically examining the democratic limits and positive aspects of the concepts of environmental and ecological citizenship, deliberative democracy, and eco-modernism. They then present the concepts of civic education and offer answers to the question of what parameters responsible civic education should meet. First, they show the current interdependence between the subject of civic education and climate change. They then present Westheimer’s models of civic education in relation to sustainability and the deepening of democratic processes. Here, the model of a justice-oriented citizen is presented in relation to the concept of responsible citizenship, where responsibility is extended to that of taking action for the benefit of society as a whole.

Keywords: civic education, climate change education, mitigation, adaptation, civil disobedience, responsible citizenship

Received: September 2, 2025; Revised: July 20, 2026; Accepted: July 22, 2026; Prepublished online: October 26, 2026 

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