Evaluating climate change education in Indonesia’s Merdeka curriculum: a content analysis of lower secondary school textbooks

With the worsening climate crisis, several countries have begun integrating Climate Change Education (CCE) into their school curricula to prepare the next generation resilient to climate change. Indonesia, one of the nations most vulnerable to the climate crisis, barely included CCE in the lower secondary schools in the 2013 national curriculum. Following the renewal of the national curriculum to the Merdeka curriculum in 2022, an evaluation of climate change coverage and discussion in the school materials is lacking. Meanwhile, textbooks as a central educational medium should be rigorously evaluated as the climate crisis worsens. We conducted a content analysis of 68 Merdeka-curriculum textbooks from lower secondary schools and found 129 direct climate change-related sentences, 296 visuals, and progressive learning materials related to climate change. However, among these, only 5% of direct climate change-related sentences addressed or were associated with the local context of climate change. To make Merdeka-curriculum textbooks more effective, more CCE materials that engage students in learning about specific climate change issues in Indonesia should be integrated.