Textbooks continue to be the most widely used educational resource in the classroom. It could be argued that one of their advantages is that they unify the content to be covered, the teaching guidelines for addressing it and when to do so. However, they tend to present compartmentalised information, with disciplinary biases and decontextualised, which makes it difficult to offer a comprehensive and situated vision of socially relevant issues, such as the climate crisis, which are difficult to fit into the disciplinary frameworks of the curriculum.

For a decade we have been analysing how climate change (CC) is dealt in the textbooks (TB) for Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) published in Spain (RESCLIMA Project1). It is possible that the new curricular framework established in the LOMLOE (BOE, 2020) will serve to promote a more relevant treatment of the climate crisis in these materials (Project RESCLIM@TIEMPOS2).

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2018, p. 23) has recommended increasing investments in education to accelerate large-scale behavioural changes compatible with the decarbonisation of our societies as educational responses have so far been insufficient. TBs are no exception. In general, they tend to focus more on the impacts than on the causes of CC, while neglecting its structural socio-economic causes. Furthermore, they devote little space to presenting alternatives for mitigating CC and reducing our vulnerability to it. The current TBs offer hardly any learning opportunities to critically empower students and to meaningfully connect their everyday world with the climate crisis. In view of the possibilities opened up by the LOMLOE, with the recognition of the climate emergency as a priority for the Spanish education system, we present 9 recommendations aimed at aligning TBs with this new regulatory framework

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Meira Cartea, P. Á., & Serantes-Pazos, A. (2025). The climate crisis in Spanish textbooks: nine proposals for a new era. Evaluation of Digital Materials and Resources in Education, 269.