Climate change poses a serious threat to the ocean on which the Seychelles economy depends for resources and services. To address this concern, the Seychelles National Climate Change Response Strategy recommends education about climate change in all levels of the education system to nurture young people with the capacity to address climate change impacts. This quantitative, descriptive, cross-sectional survey measures the level of climate change science literacy among teachers in Seychelles on a five-point summated scale (Extremely Low, Low, Medium, High, and Extremely High). Data was collected with a 15-item Climate Change Science Literacy Questionnaire (CCSLQ) from 572 participants representing 42.62% of the population of teachers in public schools at the time of the survey. Ethical considerations relating to access, informed consent, anonymity, and confidentiality were fulfilled. Collected data was analysed statistically with descriptive techniques (percentage, means, standard error of measurement and confidence interval) and inferential technique with the Fisher’s Exact Chi-Square test. Statistical operation was performed with the Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS). Results indicate that the majority of the participants (37.4%, n=214) have medium literacy regarding climate change science with misconceptions on all three domains of climate change science: causes, impacts, and solutions. Educational interventions to enhance teachers’ knowledge and understanding of climate change are recommended; otherwise the teachers will transfer inaccurate concepts to the learners. Without young Seychellois with the capacity to take action on climate change, it may be wearisome for Seychelles to achieve a smooth transition to a blue economy.
When world leaders and delegates convened in Madrid, Spain in December 2019 for the 25th Congress of Parties (COP-25) to re-evaluate their obligations to the Paris Agreement on climate change, they could not prefigure coronavirus was about to overrun humanity. Virtually everyone describes climate change as the most complex ecological and social crisis confronting society in this century. When coronavirus outbreak struck humanity in December 2019, virtually everyone also describes it as the most complex crisis that had struck mankind since the end of Second World War. Both crises have also attracted significant response from policymakers; yet no research has weighed these two common challenges of our time side-by-side in a single study to establish whether they have equivalent level of complexity. This is crucial because confronting a problem without first understanding its complexity would culminate in a waste of resources and or failure to find a permanent solution to it. To address this concern, this paper evaluates global climate change and corona-virus 2019 outbreak using complexity theory as a conceptual framework, and makes recommendations for policy and research based on the outcomes.
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