Eleanor Pinches, Education Officer at the Royal Meteorological Society

In this blog, the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) education team highlights professional development opportunities, trusted resources, common misconceptions and ways to strengthen climate education across the curriculum. Whether you're refreshing your knowledge or developing your climate teaching, reliable support is essential.

Building on the Enhance your Teaching: Teaching Climate Change webinar we delivered with Cambridge OCR in February 2026 for GCSE Geography A and B, we'll explore how you can continue to develop and strengthen your climate teaching. We’ll also consider how applying a climate lens, as recommended in the Curriculum and Assessment Review, could support your teaching, and how sharing your existing expertise and working with colleagues in other subjects can help strengthen climate education.

Climate education has a home in geography

Climate change education has historically been siloed within geography, which may be something you’re happy to take ownership of, or it may be one of the areas you find most challenging to teach. Looking to the near future, the Curriculum and Assessment Review suggests that climate education will remain firmly rooted in the geography classroom, continuing to provide a strong foundation for pupils’ climate education. If anything, its presence is set to grow, with Curriculum and Assessment Review recommending that climate education and sustainability be “bolstered” within the Science and Geography curricula.

So, with greater emphasis on climate education on the horizon, how can you prepare?

Strengthening your climate subject knowledge

From our work with teachers, limited subject knowledge is one of the main reasons teachers feel less confident about, dislike or even avoid teaching climate change. Good subject knowledge means not only feeling confident teaching the specification, but also being able to respond to students’ questions, including knowing where to find reliable answers when they go beyond it.

Fortunately, there are plenty of places to build your climate subject knowledge and access professional development, including:

• Weather and Climate: A Teachers’ Guide: Written by RMetS specifically for secondary geography teachers, the guide covers 20 weather and climate topics. The More for Teachers section of each chapter provides accompanying professional development, available as written content or videos, alongside useful links for further learning.
• UCL’s Teaching for Sustainable Futures: Free professional development designed to help teachers develop their understanding of climate change and sustainability and embed these topics into their teaching.
• UN CC:e-Learn: A wide range of learning opportunities covering climate change, green economies and sustainable development, varying in length and level of detail.
• Office for Climate Education: Alongside classroom resources, the site includes useful material for developing subject knowledge and supporting professional learning.
• Improving Climate Literacy in the Geography Classroom: An interactive guide from Kit Marie Rackley, offering a systematic approach to improving climate literacy.

For the latest climate data, facts, figures and policy updates, these are useful, reliable sources:

• IPCC Assessment Reports: The authoritative global overview of climate science, impacts and responses. The next assessment report, the IPCC’s 7th, is due in 2027.
• Carbon Brief: Accessible, in-depth coverage of climate science and policy, including useful fact-checks and more positive climate developments.
• World Weather Attribution: Rapid analysis of how climate change influences the likelihood and intensity of extreme weather events.
• Climate Change Committee: Useful UK statistics and reports on climate impacts, progress and preparedness.
• State of the Climate reports: Annual global, European and UK updates from the WMO, Copernicus/ECMWF and Met Office respectively.
• Copernicus applications: Explore and interact with real climate data. The ERA Explorer, Climate Atlas and Fire Emissions Watch are particularly worth exploring.
• Simon Clark: An online creator producing accessible, up-to-date videos on climate science and related topics.

Prepare yourself for common misconceptions

Another way to build your own subject knowledge, sometimes without even realising it, is to familiarise yourself with common climate misconceptions. These misconceptions can crop up everywhere, including in educational resources. Being able to recognise them is important if we are to avoid repeating or reinforcing them in resources developed to support the new curriculum.

Some of the most common misconceptions include:

• The enhanced greenhouse effect.The greenhouse effect is a natural process that humans are enhancing, not causing. It traps some of the Earth’s outgoing heat, rather than the Sun’s incoming radiation. Shortwave radiation from the Sun largely passes through the atmosphere and warms the Earth’s surface. Because the Earth is much cooler than the Sun, it emits longwave radiation, some of which is absorbed and re-emitted by greenhouse gases rather than escaping to space, warming the atmosphere. There is also no single layer of greenhouse gases high in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases are mixed throughout the troposphere, the lowest part of the atmosphere, with their concentration greatest near the Earth’s surface.
• Scientists ‘believe’ climate change is human induced. Using ‘believe’ can be misleading, as it does not reflect the strength of the scientific consensus. More than 99% of peer-reviewed scientific literature agrees that current climate change is human-caused. Wording such as ‘the evidence shows’ better reflects the high level of scientific confidence.
• The supposed ‘positives of climate change’. Supposed positives include longer growing seasons, increased plant growth, new shipping routes and even new wine-growing regions. However, rather than focusing on these supposed benefits, we encourage looking at the co-benefits of climate action. Climate action can support many of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including better health and well-being (SDG 3), cleaner water (SDG 6), affordable clean energy (SDG 7), and protecting life below water and on land (SDGs 14 and 15).

These misconceptions are just a small handful. More commonly identified misconceptions are explored in Climate Clarity: common climate misconceptions.

Applying a climate lens and cross-curriculum

The co-benefits of climate action highlight the interdisciplinary nature of the climate and nature crisis, and this can be reflected in climate education.

The Curriculum and Assessment Review acknowledged that “pedagogy has an important role in applying an engaging climate lens to existing curriculum content”. Consider where this lens could be applied in your teaching. When looking at migration, for example, explore how rising temperatures or sea levels can contribute to people leaving places, and the knock-on effects on conflict, economics and education. When covering urban environments, consider adaptation and mitigation measures, particularly those with multiple benefits. Draw on relevant, up-to-date case studies, such as the Valencia floods, where building on floodplains contributed to the scale of the devastation.

Work across subjects with colleagues in science, design and technology, and citizenship. Agree on shared definitions so students can connect their learning across subjects, and plan together to ensure progression. This might include aligning teaching on ocean acidification in science and geography. Sylvia Knight and Mike Jackson’s blog on where climate sits within Cambridge OCR’s GCSE geography and science could support these conversations.

The freely accessible Climate Change Association Tool can also help you apply a climate lens, highlighting connections you may not have previously considered.

Support for classroom resources

There are a number of places to find classroom-ready resources. MetLink is a great place to start, with resources spanning geography, science and maths across primary and secondary, alongside cross-curricular activities, such as exploring media literacy through a climate lens.

The Office for Climate Education also offers a broad range of resources.

Finally, keep an eye out for the Quality Mark! Resources displaying the mark have passed the framework for climate content, pedagogy, or both. If you are developing resources to share with others, RMetS can support you through the process.

Stay connected

At Cambridge OCR we’re committed to making assessment straightforward and are here to support teachers and students at every step of the way. Contact us if you have any specific questions. 

You can always join our teacher panels to help us shape the development of these qualifications as we go through reform. 

To stay up to date with subject news from us, make sure you sign up to receive our email updates. You can also email us at geography@ocr.org.uk.

About the author

Eleanor Pinches is an Education Officer at the Royal Meteorological Society, supporting a wide range of the Society’s education activities, from resource development to initial teaching training subject days. She has a background in meteorology and climate science, having graduated from the University of Reading, and previously worked as a weather forecaster. Eleanor’s focus is on improving climate literacy among school students and giving them the confidence and understanding needed to make informed decisions in their future lives and careers.