Education and Citizen engagement as drivers for ecological transition: the GreenSCENT project

While climate change and environmental degradation are already causing a higher frequency of extreme weather events, worldwide temperature increases, and climatic instability, citizenship hardly recognizes climate change and environment-related issues as main challenges for the next decades. Recent studies suggest that the majority of the citizens does not consider Climate and Environmental diseases among the most serious problems. On the other hand, communication, information, awareness and education are seen as key strategies for engaging people in understanding the challenges humanity and planet Earth are facing, and acting positively and appropriately. GreenSCENT (https://www.green-scent.eu/) is a project funded under Horizon 2020 European Commission framework program for Research and Innovation. Its main objective is to support EU Green Deal policy implementation involving EU citizens, and especially youth, in co-creating, experimenting and validating a Multidisciplinary European Competence Framework (GreenComp) covering the main thematic areas of the EU Green Deal. GreenComp will be developed in a lifelong learning perspective, covering educational levels from primary schools to Higher education and continuous professional development, through a participatory multi-stakeholder approach engaging young students, teachers and finally citizens from all schools and educational institutions in Europe. The first section of the proposed work presents GreenSCENT project’s motivations, objectives and pillars. The second section of this paper provides details about the project methodology, while section 3 will present the activities in the first Phase of the project. Conclusions focuses on the foreseen challenges in the development and validation of digital and hybrid tools, educational activities and frameworks enabling EU citizen to embrace the new EU Green Deal.