Green Pedagogy and En-ROADS – a good fit?

Being an enthusiastic convert to Green Pedagogy and having been recently introduced to En-ROADS, I began to wonder if the two could be a good fit. So far this is just an idea not yet tried out in a real classroom.

What I like about Green Pedagogy are especially the last two steps where learners implement a local project and finally where learners imagine a world where their project action is carried out on a larger scale. I like this because many lessons on sustainability end on “and this is how dire the situation is”.

Since the time I was discovering Green Pedagogy, 2015-2018, the issue of climate anxiety in its various forms has been documented as growing, especially in young people. The strategy which seems to work best to mitigate climate anxiety is action, especially collaborative action, which gives people a sense of agency. And this circles back to the last two steps of Green Pedagogy.

The biggest issue I foresee in using En-ROADS within a Green Pedagogy format is that in most cases, learning is focused on an atomistic topic whereas En-ROADS is a systems tool designed to look at the system as a whole, in this case, climate change. To begin to test the suitability of En-ROADS within Green Pedagogy I created a sample lesson following the Green Pedagogy framework with En-ROADS as a tool.

The aim of the lesson is to examine the issue of meat consumption and the extent to which variations in meat consumption could be beneficial for mitigating climate change.

The six Green Pedagogy stages unfold as follows (other trajectories are possible):

1. Confrontation: Use the “Food from animals” slider to simulate higher meat consumption from a baseline of 30% to 40%. Let students observe the temperature rise and land-use changes eg deforestation shown below.
2. Conceptual change: Students journal or discuss: “What values influence your food choices?” Include health, culture, convenience, ethics. Compare scenarios with reduced meat consumption. Ask: “Which scenario aligns with your values?”
3. Expand perspectives: Role plays with farmers. Explore ripple effects—how dietary changes affect methane, land use, and food security globally.
4. Interaction: Students co-create a “Sustainable Food Future” poster or digital story. What does a climate-friendly food system look like? Build an En-ROADS scenario with reduced meat consumption, improved agricultural practices, and food waste reduction. Aim for <2°C warming. Eg while in “Agricultural emissions and food choices”, look at deforestation effects and % of food from animals. This will prompt the need to look at other potential policy levers from the rest of the En-ROADS simulator because 2% reduction is not possible with changes in animal food alone.
5. Deconstruction: Students design a campus or community initiative—e.g., plant-based cooking workshop, cafeteria audit, awareness campaign. Model the global impact of scaling local actions. Discuss feasibility and barriers.
6. Evaluation & vision: Students write a blog post or record a podcast: “What did I learn about climate, food, and myself?” Revisit the initial scenario and compare with the final one. What changed? What surprised them?

Although the starting point in this learning unit was very specific, examining meat consumption, it soon became necessary to look at secondary effects such as deforestation. And finally, since altering meat consumption levels is not sufficient on its own to significantly reduce global warming, this naturally led on to what other policy levers needed to be used in order to achieve a result of under 2 degrees of warming.

Presented at ICEBIT 2025, Tirana, Albania 6th December, 2025