Climate Change and Health: A Study of the Attitudes of Future Science Teachers

Living beings as open systems depend on climate and weather to survive. However, changes in the Earth's climatology, which have become more frequent since the industrial period, have affected different territories of the planet, limiting access to ecosystem services and causing imbalances in health and well-being. The first purpose of this study is to conduct a literature review on academic production regarding climate change and its impact on health, in the context of education, using international academic production condensed in the Web of Science (WOS) database over the last 10 years as a reference. The second purpose focuses on identifying the environmental attitudes of science teachers in initial training regarding aspects related to climate change. The study results show three categories emerging from the literature review: Climate Change and Health, Nature and Risks, and Environment and Energy. For the analysis of environmental attitudes, a survey was conducted with 51 pre-service teachers, consisting of 59 items distributed in five categories: (a) environment, (b) climate change, (c) health, (d) education, and (e) lifestyle. Although the results reveal a positive attitude towards all analyzed categories, it is important to advance effective mitigation and adaptation strategies from the teacher training processes themselves.