It matters whether history is part of how we teach about the climate crisis: shaped by human actions over time, it is fundamentally a historical phenomenon. That is why students need more than numerical data showing how the climate is changing; they need understanding of how humans have driven those changes. To participate in debates about the climate crisis, they need opportunities to examine its causes and consequences – including how benefits and burdens have been unevenly distributed across people and other nature.

Yet in Finland, where I teach secondary-level history, the climate crisis is not explicitly included in the national curricula for history. The guidelines, however, emphasise teaching skills over content, leaving plenty of room to choose which topics to cover. I therefore wanted to examine whether those who interpret the curricula bring the climate crisis into history education. In the first article of my PhD project, I focus on secondary-level history textbooks, which continue to shape how the subject is taught and learned in Finland. Rather than just asking whether textbooks address the climate crisis, I wanted to examine how they do so.

Perhaps most importantly, I found that although most textbooks mention the climate crisis, they fall short in presenting its historical trajectory. A clear example is the weak connection between the phenomenon and the eighteenth‑century Industrial Revolution. The climate crisis rarely comes up in units exploring early industrialisation, although this was when emissions began their climb. Instead, discussing the climate crisis is often pushed into contemporary contexts, for instance when referring to pollution from later-industrialised nations. Such framing, however, makes it harder for students to see the climate crisis as a long-term, cumulative phenomenon and to understand where today’s debates about climate justice and responsibility come from.

By publishing my article in the History Education Research Journal, I hope to encourage reflection among peers on whether history textbooks – and history education in general – have stepped up to their role in climate education. Students can find facts on the climate in many sources, but history offers something distinctive: ways of exploring cause and consequence, change and continuity as well as benefits and burdens. It can provide students with the disciplinary skills and knowledge to understand the climate crisis not only as historically rooted, but also as unevenly experienced by people and other nature. By studying how present challenges have been driven by past human decisions, they can begin to see how the choices we make today shape future possibilities.

Teaching history and the climate crisis: missed opportunities in Finnish textbooks? by Liina-Maria Nevalainen (University of Helsinki, Finland) is published in HERJ volume 23.

Liina-Maria Nevalainen is a doctoral researcher in the Doctoral Programme in Education, Schooling, and Learning at the University of Helsinki. Her PhD research project, Teaching the past and the planet – History education in the age of the climate crisis, explores the role of school history in deepening our understanding of and response to contemporary ecosocial challenges.

historical thinking history education textbook analysis the climate crisis powerful knowledge