Climate change education plays a crucial role in fostering scientific literacy and preparing students to engage with sustainability challenges. Despite widespread awareness of climate change, there remains a gap between knowledge and action, highlighting the need for science education to develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and inquiry skills. Citizen science has emerged as a promising approach to integrating real-world scientific practices into formal education, engaging students in data collection, analysis, and collaborative learning. However, the feasibility of such initiatives depends on their alignment with school curricula. The alignment of citizen science projects with curricular contents is expected to increase the chance of teachers engaging with those and of using projects’ resources in their teaching practices. Several studies analysed European curricula and these highlight significant variability in how countries integrate scientific concepts, critical thinking, and socioscientific issues (Mavrikaki et al., 2024; Pessoa et al., 2025). However, none of these studies looked for the opportunities to explore citizen science projects related to climate change. With this study, we aim to contribute to overcoming this knowledge gap, identifying which curricular contents in four European countries are aligned with citizen science projects on climate change.

For that we analysed the curricula of the four European countries involved in this project- France, Greece, Portugal and Spain -to recognize opportunities to explore fake news related to climate change through a citizen science approach.

We performed a content analysis of these curricula, with categories developed based on the literature. Categories 1, 2 and 3 were based on the proposal of Rieckman (2018) and PISA 2025 dimensions of scientific literacy (OECD, 2023) for essential learning goals for students to develop key competencies to address climate change.

  • Category 1 is relative to content knowledge relative to climate change.
  • Categories 2 and 3 address, respectively, socio-emotional and behavioral learning goals relative to climate change.
  • Categories 4 and 5 address learning goals relative to procedural and epistemic knowledge respectively, two important dimensions of scientific literacy (OECD, 2023).

Preliminary results

Our preliminary results reveal substantial opportunities to explore climate change through citizen science across all four countries, with a strong representation of climate content knowledge, procedural knowledge, and socio-emotional learning goals. Behavioral learning goals associated with climate change and epistemic knowledge are less prevalent, particularly in Portuguese curricula. These findings highlight both the potential and the challenges of implementing climate-change citizen science projects in European schools.