The National Curriculum has become a vehicle for climate alarmism, risking lasting damage to young minds.
Climate anxiety is being increasingly reported among Australian children. While this is often simply dismissed as the by-product of broader public awareness of climate change, far less attention has been paid to the role of the Australian education system—specifically the National Curriculum and the teaching materials used in classrooms.
Climate anxiety is commonly defined as chronic worry about the future of the planet due to human-induced climate change (anthropogenic climate change). It extends beyond ordinary concern about environmental issues and can become a debilitating psychological burden that undermines the wellbeing and development of young people. It may manifest through a range of psychological symptoms, including obsessive thoughts about environmental destruction, sleeplessness, depression, difficulty concentrating at school, and heightened feelings of existential dread and guilt linked to one’s personal environmental impact.
In the Winter 2025 issue of the IPA Review, IPA Adjunct Fellow and clinical child psychologist Clare Rowe brought to light the severity of the issue. In this article, we expose the fundamental role played by Australia’s education system in exacerbating childhood climate anxiety.
THE SUSTAINABILITY CROSS-CURRICULUM PRIORITY
That children as young as 12 are already convinced that they should be worried suggests that they have been taught to fear climate change. This is the direct result of the National Curriculum, a standardised framework outlining what all Australian students should be taught from Foundation to Year 10.
The Curriculum introduces children as young as five to climate change through the mandated cross-curriculum priority of Sustainability. The Sustainability priority spans the education system, beginning in Foundation, and requires that every subject and year level teach sustainability as a priority.
The Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority (ACARA) clearly identifies the objectives of the cross-curriculum priority of Sustainability as being directly linked to climate change education and activism. It defines sustainability in the following terms:
Sustainability addresses the ongoing capacity of Earth to maintain all life. Sustainable patterns of living seek to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of future generations … Young people require the knowledge and skills to engage with contemporary issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, equitable access to resources, and preservation of cultural and language diversity. They are looking for social, economic and political models that provide solutions to these issues … The Sustainability cross-curriculum priority [is] designed to raise student awareness about informed action to create a more environmentally and socially just world.
This is not a neutral framing. The emphasis on “informed action” and a “socially just world” positions climate change not simply as a scientific issue, but as a moral and political one.
In 2021, ACARA conducted a review of the Sustainability cross-curriculum priority, noting its alignment with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals and the 2019 Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration. Both documents promote behavioural and political responses to climate change, embedding an expectation of action rather than neutral inquiry.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals emphasise urgent and radical action on climate change. For example, Goal 13 is to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”, with the UN noting that the world stands “at the brink of climate calamity”. Other goals to promote climate action include the adoption of “clean” energy and “responsible” consumption of resources.
The 2019 Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration—a joint statement from Australian education ministers across jurisdictions—states that the education system must prepare young people to engage with “concepts such as sustainability” and to prepare for “complex environmental, social and economic challenges”.
This thematic undercurrent of the entire National Curriculum means it is ideologically skewed towards climate education, providing unfettered access to activists supplying alarmist climate education material to schools. Because Sustainability is embedded across all subjects and year levels, climate messaging becomes a continuous presence throughout a child’s schooling.
THIRD-PARTY PROVIDERS
The reality is that many teachers are time-poor and face the constant challenge of producing creative lesson content for their students. Therefore, many must rely on curriculum-aligned teaching materials produced by external providers. These materials play a significant role in shaping how climate change is presented in the classroom.
Some of the largest providers include:
- Cool.org, which produces curriculum-aligned materials on environmental and social justice issues that it claims have been downloaded more than 2.3 million times. It estimates that over 2.5 million students have used its materials since 2008, and that 201,000 Australian teachers have signed up to use its teaching materials.
- Behind the News (BtN), which is produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. BtN is one of the longest running television shows in Australia, airing one main BtN Classroom episode weekly for school classrooms.
- The World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The WWF is one of the largest wildlife advocacy organisations in the world and offers free educational materials to teachers, promising “From rainforests to rivers, climate change to citizenship, we’ve got something to help you and your pupils learn about our precious planet, the environmental challenges it faces and how we can all take action”.
These providers, among many others, regularly promote narratives that emphasise urgency, crisis, and the need for action. And their materials are frequently designed to influence student attitudes and behaviours, not simply to inform and educate.
A GATEWAY FOR RADICAL GREEN IDEOLOGY
At face value, teaching children environmental stewardship and a sense of personal responsibility is valuable. However, our analysis of the Sustainability priority finds the National Curriculum exposes children to three central themes that go beyond basic environmental stewardship:
- The notion that Earth’s ability to sustain life is under threat from climate change.
- A moral framing that places psychological responsibility on children.
- The transition from emotional concern about the environment to climate activism.
First, the National Curriculum teaches that the Earth’s ability to sustain life is under threat due to anthropogenic climate change. The Sustainability cross-curriculum-priority states:
Sustainability addresses the ongoing capacity of Earth to maintain all life. Sustainable patterns of living seek to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of future generations.
This enables third-party providers to disseminate teaching materials which stress the fragility of the Earth, teaching children that climate change is an existential threat to humanity.
For example, in a Behind the News episode, the presenter warns that the global temperature could increase by four degrees by 2100, explaining:
How could four degrees possibly have any effect on our planet? Well our earth is a really delicate place. All of our weather patterns, ice caps, and water systems are finely balanced … With extra heat around, the immense amount of ice around the polar caps will start to melt, dumping billions and billions of litres into the sea. Low lying island nations, like Kiribati in the Pacific, are already facing big problems with rising sea levels. These people’s homes aren’t far from going under the waves forever. But by 2100, if the predictions are correct, all of these areas could follow suit, including some parts of Australia.
This dialogue is accompanied by distressing footage of Kiribati residents struggling against dangerous rising seawater, as well as animated projections of global cities being flooded by rising sea levels over time, with the implication that Sydney could also be flooded. For children, the direct implication is that their home could be flooded, and their life endangered by climate change.
Other teaching materials frequently stress that the Earth’s ability to sustain life is under immediate threat due to human activity. In a lesson designed for a product design and technology class, The World Wildlife Fund teaches children that:
The climate crisis threatens to destroy life on our planet as we know it. The way humans have been living is part of the problem. From burning fossil fuels for energy to clearing forests for industry and agriculture, to throwing away plastics and waste in vast amounts, if we are to turn the tide of climate change then a new sustainable way of living is needed.
Second, the National Curriculum places the psychological responsibility for climate change on children. ACARA writes that “Actions should reflect values of care, respect and responsibility, and require individuals and communities to recognise, adapt to and manage change”. In practice, this creates a moral framework in which students are encouraged to see climate action as a duty rather than a choice.
This sense of self-blame can produce significant anxiety.
This places a burden of responsibility on very young shoulders. Children are made to feel personally responsible for environmental destruction and the harming of animals. This sense of self-blame can produce significant anxiety, as children come to believe that their own actions, or inaction, directly contribute to the suffering of living creatures and the degradation of the planet.
In another example, a geography lesson plan produced by the World Wildlife Fund provides images of polar bears on melting icebergs and directs children to write a story in the first person from the perspective of a polar animal, experiencing the effects of climate change. Children are asked “What challenges do they face? How does it make them feel?” By teaching children that polar bears, in this instance, are suffering at human hands, the Curriculum engenders guilt and a sense of helplessness about the future of the planet.
The World Wildlife Fund promotes the following alarmist claims in schools leading children to feel dismay and anxiety over the death of species:
- “Warm, polluted, acidic seas kill coral reefs, which are an important home to over 2 million species.”
- “One in six species are at risk of extinction due to climate change.”
- “Experts have calculated that if Earth’s temperature rises by just 1.5 degrees Celsius, up to 30% of species may be at risk of extinction. If temperatures increase by 2 degrees Celsius, most ecosystems will struggle.”
- “By 2050, oceans could contain more plastic than fish.”
This moral dimension is heightened by the narrative that the actions of children harm other people. This leads children to embrace the notion of “climate justice”: the idea that failing to act on climate change is a social injustice against those who are most vulnerable to its impacts. For example, an Oxfam lesson for students aged 9-11 prompts children to play a climate game, prompting students to “Discuss the inequality of the climate emergency. Who is impacted the most, and in what ways? Who is impacted the least? Why do you think this is? Is this fair?”
The natural consequence is children are taught that so-called environmentally friendly activities are the socially just solution. It is unsurprising then that support for environmental policies is so popular among those who have just left school: they have been primed by the education system to see environmental action as a moral cause.
This leads to our third finding, that children are moved from emotional concern to climate activism. The Sustainability priority teaches that the threats to the Earth can be mitigated through urgent climate action. ACARA notes that this action is both “individual and collective”, and that it is only through adopting “sustainable patterns of living” that “the needs of future generations” can be protected. This results in the dissemination of classroom materials that stress the need for immediate action. In a BtN episode played in classrooms, children are warned that they are facing “global boiling” and that “UN global leaders and experts everywhere seem to agree that we’re facing a climate emergency”. Footage proceeds to show smoking landscapes, bushfires, melting ice caps, and industrial production from factories and refineries. The episode warns, “We need to do something quickly to avoid an average temperature increase that many say would be disastrous”.
The National Curriculum’s emphasis on ‘informed action’ normalises activism as a response to classroom learning. Children are moved from emotional concern to political expression.
The action-oriented nature of the Curriculum encourages teachers to seek out materials that promote action and advocacy on sustainability and environmental issues generally. Examples from the National Curriculum include:
- “devising a chant/rap that a character from an animated series, a text or a fictional hero could use to communicate a health or sustainability message.” (Foundation, The Arts)
- “reflecting on personal behaviours and identifying attitudes that may affect aspects of the environment at a local or global level; for example, pouring paints down the sink, using products sourced from cleared rainforests and proposing awareness-raising strategies to reduce impacts on the environment.” (Year 4, Humanities and Social Science)
- “proposing possible actions that could be taken to address an issue (for example, improving the management of waste in the school, choosing products not made from endangered species or their habitats) and identifying resources needed to support the actions and likely outcomes (for example, composting lunch waste and using it on the school garden, making socially responsible decisions).” (Year 4, Humanities and Social Science)
Little wonder then that so many young Australian children have been involved in political activism in recent years; the Curriculum has taught them that this is a viable outlet for their anxiety.
FORESEEABLE HARM
It is particularly pernicious that children are being bombarded by fear-based messaging at a critical time in their development. The potential long-term consequences of what’s happening in classrooms cannot be overstated. As evidence of climate anxiety among children continues to grow, the potential harms associated with alarmist or catastrophising classroom messaging are no longer speculative, but foreseeable.
If these trends persist, Australia may face a generation of students who are both academically underprepared and psychologically burdened by climate-related fear. The long-term costs—to public health, workforce readiness, and social cohesion—will be profound.
The Sustainability cross-curriculum priority must be significantly reformed if not abolished altogether.
This article from the Autumn 2026 edition of the IPA Review is written by the IPA’s Colleen Harkin and Margaret Chambers.
