Future-oriented Science Education Building Sustainability Competences: An Approach to the European GreenComp Framework

In order to promote learning for environmental sustainability, the European Union launched the GreenComp framework in 2022. The framework identifies a set of sustainability competences that should be cultivated across all learning contexts to support the action-taking and transformations required by global ecological crises. The framework comprises four interrelated competence areas: ‘embodying sustainability values’, ‘embracing complexity in sustainability’, ‘envisioning sustainable futures’ and ‘acting for sustainability’. Our chapter argues that science education has significant potential to contribute to all these areas. We discuss in this chapter the affordances of current frameworks in science education for fostering sustainability competences. We argue that there is a need for a coherent approach connecting these areas, and that it can be done within future-oriented science education. We illustrate the suggestions by reviewing some examples of approaches for teaching and learning developed in the European project “FEDORA”.