The world faces numerous eco-social issues, including climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, intersecting with challenges such as poverty, war, exclusion, and extremism. Multi-faceted and intersectional injustices (including intergenerational, racial, economic) persist in relation to the extent to which different communities have contributed to the current challenges and have access to resources to enable effective mitigation and adaptation to the impacts of environmental crises. Ecologically and socially just forms of learning and rights-based encounter are required in education.

Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) research therefore looks across the ecological, economic, political, and social dimensions of our everyday lives. This research explores our ongoing relations with each other, with places, and the plants and animals that inhabit them. Biodiversity loss, habitat loss, climate change, the distribution of wealth and resources, colonialism, eco-social health, local and indigenous knowledge, intergenerational and intercultural learning, and depletion of natural resources are all relevant issues for this strand of our research. Education (including formal, non-formal and informal education) clearly has a key role to play in enabling new forms of outdoor learning, global/glocal citizenship, and embodying a more eco-socially just and sustainable way of life; research is urgently needed to support this work.

The ESE researchers at University of Stirling seek to critically investigate how education, learning, environmental and sustainability issues interrelate. Our research already contributes to key debates, practices and policies through conceptual and methodological development in ESE fields. We conduct empirical, theoretical and collaborative ESE research in formal and informal educational settings from early years settings through to adult and professional learning environments.

Through ESE research, we seek to explore, explain and support educators to co-design adaptive, reciprocal responses at a time when environmental and sustainability concerns such as biodiversity loss and climate change demand new forms of relational curriculum making with/in place. Through our research and policy engagement we aim to better understand and enable new practices and policy making, which is critical, intergenerational, justice-oriented and responsive to place.