A Comparative Analysis of Climate Change Education between Developed and Developing Countries: A Comparative Document Analysis

Abstract

Climate change education (CCE) is widely recognised as central to sustainability, yet its implementation across national school systems remains deeply uneven. This study uses comparative qualitative document analysis to examine how CCE is positioned, integrated and resourced across six countries, Finland, England and Australia as high-income systems, and Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kenya as climate-vulnerable lower-income systems using a most different-systems design. National policies, curriculum frameworks, and peer-reviewed reports from 2010 to 2025 were analysed through directed thematic analysis across six dimensions: policy commitment, curriculum integration, teacher capacity, pedagogy and assessment, resources, and local contextualisation. Findings are summarised through the Climate Education Readiness Index (CERI), a criterion-referenced rubric with reported reliability and robustness checks. The findings contradict a simple dichotomy between developed and developing countries. High-income systems show gaps from exam-driven curricula, uneven teacher confidence, and thin explicit climate content; lower-income systems show capacity gaps, limited assessment alignment, and outright policy reversal. In all six cases, the coherence of policy, curriculum, teacher development, assessment and local context is more closely related to CCE quality than national income. Drawn from a small purposive sample and with coherence not directly measured, these results are read as hypotheses rather than causal claims. CCE is thus not created by copying high-income models but by aligning what policy says, what teachers can do, and what assessment rewards.