First Education Conference on CO₂ Removal – Review, Outlook, Materials

Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time and affects society as a whole. It is therefore our shared responsibility to work toward solutions. Nowhere else is our society represented as fully and broadly as in schools. Furthermore, students are the ones who will be most severely affected by the consequences of climate change. For this reason, climate education is of great interest to them and should be integrated into all subject areas in schools.

The active removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere (Carbon Dioxide Removal, CDR) is an important aspect of this. In climate research, it is considered necessary to meet the 1.5-degree target. This is a complex topic that must be well understood and discussed from multiple perspectives. CDR is therefore well-suited as a thematic model for a concept of Education for Sustainable Development.

CDRterra, the research program on land-based CO₂ removal funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, therefore organized its first nationwide education conference on the topic of CDR. Under the motto “Developing perspectives, testing development and communication formats, designing lessons,” teachers from all subject areas and school types, student teachers, school administrators, and stakeholders from teacher education and extracurricular education gathered from October 10–11, 2023, to jointly advance climate education in schools.

On the first day of the education conference, the focus was on the technical complexity of CDR: Researchers presented CDR measures and answered questions from the audience. On the second day, participants worked together in lectures, workshops, and participatory formats to develop ideas for the methodological and didactic integration of CDR into school education and discussed the prerequisites for a critical and constructive discourse in the school environment.

Your Contact Person:

Dr. Katrin Geneuss: CDRBildungskonferenz@geographie.uni-muenchen.de

Dr. Katrin Geneuss is the director of the CDR education program. In an interview with Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich, she explains why complex topics such as climate change and carbon capture are not yet sufficiently represented in the classroom and how this could be changed.

Interview with Dr Katrin Geneuss