Labs4Future

Labs4Future is an innovative, design-based research student laboratory that addresses the complexity of the climate crisis through multi-perspective, action-oriented climate education. The project engages secondary students in learning settings that aim to bridge the knowledge–action gap, while pre-service teachers gain experience in supervising inquiry-based climate learning.

At the heart of Labs4Future lies the Lessons4Action framework, which links four domains of climate knowledge with learning pathways informed by environmental psychology and research on the determinants of climate-related action.

What happens in Labs4Future?

Across two full days (approx. 6–7 hours each), pre-service teachers guide students through interconnected activities:

Understanding the climate system

Students investigate the carbon cycle, natural and anthropogenic greenhouse effect, tipping points, and local impacts of global warming through hands-on experiments and data analysis.

Connecting knowledge to responsibility and affectedness

The “Mystery” method and other structured tasks highlight how human activities drive climate change and how its consequences already affect their own region.

Exploring everyday emissions and societal structures

Using the Carbon Credits method, students visualise emissions from living, mobility, consumption, and food—revealing which actions are individually possible and which require systemic change.

Developing ideas for a low-emission future

In creative future-workshop formats, learners redesign their own cities or municipalities to explore realistic pathways of societal transformation.

 Practising argumentation and climate communication

Students learn to recognise discourses of climate delay and practise constructive communication and debunking strategies in an interactive inner–outer circle debate.

The Carbon Credits are a visual system for representing and comparing the greenhouse gas emissions of everyday actions. One Carbon Credit (CC) corresponds to 94 g CO₂e and is represented by a square tile (2.5 cm x 2.5 cm). By scaling the area of each tile to the emissions of specific behaviours, students gain an intuitive sense of where their personal daily emissions come from — and where structural change is necessary.

Combining the actions of an unrealistic minimalistic life, one can see: Even this is above the budget of 100 CC per person and day for a 1.5°C IPCC budget in 2030.

The set covers a broad range of behaviours in the domains of mobility, housing and heating, consumption, food, digital habits, and public emissions. Putting these tiles together, learners “puzzle” a typical day in their life and directly see:

·       which of their behaviours contribute most to their emissions,

·       which changes are realistically possible at an individual level (e.g. diet, room temperature, shopping habits), and

·       which emissions can only be reduced through social and political transformation (e.g. electricity mix, heating systems, transport infrastructure).

The Carbon Credits have been used with over 1400 students in the Labs4Future programme and are inspired by the Lessons4Action framework, activating key psychological determinants of action such as social norms, personal attribution, and perceived behavioural control.