Environmental education and citizen science aspire to broad participation but in practice remain skewed toward highly educated, non-disabled populations. In this Practitioner Voices contribution, we report on pilot implementations of environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling as an accessible educational practice, conducted with students with intellectual disabilities, visual impairments, and physical disabilities across three Japanese settings between 2024 and 2025. Drawing on the inherently tactile, protocol-driven nature of eDNA sampling, we worked with special-education teachers, a disability-oriented community NPO, and molecular ecologists to co-design accessibility adaptations including tactile equipment familiarisation, audio guidance, long-handled ladles, and beach mats for wheelchair users. Participants successfully collected and filtered water samples; subsequent laboratory analyses detected 30 to 50 fish taxa per sample. Detected taxa were compared with publicly available records in the ANEMONE eDNA database, a Japan-based national repository of eDNA metabarcoding biodiversity data. Field negative controls were included to assess contamination during sampling. We draw practical lessons for environmental educators, programme designers, and policymakers seeking to align environmental literacy efforts with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the broader right to science. The work suggests that selecting methodologies with inherent accessibility, rather than retrofitting accommodations onto existing protocols, can simultaneously expand who participates in environmental science and the knowledge base that participation generates.
Understanding how young people emotionally respond to environmental problems is important for examining the human dimensions of sustainability and environmental change. This study examined the emotional responses of 107 students aged 10–18 from three schools in Extremadura, Spain, to environmental issues including climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, deforestation, waste generation, resource overexploitation, and ozone-layer depletion. Using a structured questionnaire, we analyzed the emotions associated with each issue, their perceived importance, and their perceived personal impact. Concern was the most frequently reported emotion across the issues examined, while other emotions, including sadness, frustration, anger, guilt, anxiety, hope, and indifference, varied according to the environmental problem. Statistically significant differences between educational stages were limited to specific emotion–issue combinations rather than forming a consistent overall pattern. Perceived personal impact was positively associated with the importance assigned to environmental issues, and particular emotional responses were also associated with perceived importance and impact. These findings show that emotional responses constitute a relevant dimension of how young people perceive and value environmental challenges. They provide an empirical basis for considering emotionally responsive approaches to sustainability and environmental education, while not establishing the effectiveness of any specific educational strategy.
Between January and September 2026, fires in Indonesia burned more than 1.9 million hectares according to independent satellite monitoring, and the haze closed schools in Malaysia and brought unhealthy air to parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, and one estimate puts the population exposed in Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra alone at about 40 million. The season was measured in extraordinary detail, yet the record says little about who is responsible. The essay argues that the gap between measurement and responsibility is partly a problem of representation, and that Indonesian art history offers a sharp way to see it. S. Sudjojono’s critique of Mooi Indië painting exposed the colonial landscape as an image for owners who never lived inside it, and Kalimantan’s plantation landscape continues that composition, with fire as the hidden labour of its making. Hotspot detections show where fires burned, yet placing a fire inside a concession differs from establishing ownership, cause or liability. Environmental education should move beyond awareness, which does not by itself identify who is responsible, towards attribution, the evidence-bound tracing of harm to the landholders, financiers and buyers connected with it. The argument speaks to environmental governance, education and the environmental humanities.
Few topics have gained as much traction among scientists and ethicists like stewardship. Stewardship is a pragmatic ethical framework that attempts to identify the responsibilities that are owed to various stakeholders and to nature more broadly. Two prominent accounts of stewardship are present within Indigenous philosophies and adaptive management. Recently, both approaches have advocated for the recognition of relational value as a key component of ethical management. Relational value refers to the value that emerges from reciprocal relationships between members of a moral community. The idea is that ethical management practices communicate how relational values are preserved through management initiatives to relevant stakeholders. This essay examines how the relational value concept might cause disagreements among stakeholders that ultimately disrupt management initiatives because all values are scale-dependent (i.e., the problem of scale). The problem of scale is especially burdensome for stewardship because Indigenous philosophies support local sense-of-place values whereas adaptive management stresses a decentralized strategy that does not privilege any one scale. As a result, the two approaches can conflict with one another when relational values are used to motivate management initiatives. But this does not mean that the relational value concept should be summarily abandoned by stewardship. Instead, stewardship should appeal to the principle of care, which is a fundamental aspect of the relational value concept. Responsibilities that are associated with the principle of care are identifiable across multiple scales. So, stewardship can successfully appeal to relational values even when stakeholders do not view relational values from the same perspective.
Communicating climate change in African contexts remains challenging due to its perceived complexity, abstract nature, and the difficulty of connecting with the lived experience. This Practitioner Voices article reflects on Eco-Expressions Zambia: Voices for Climate Action, a national visual storytelling project that utilized participatory photography to engage citizens across all ten provinces of Zambia. The project aimed to raise awareness of climate change and its impacts, enhance dialogue, and provide a baseline for developing climate solutions. Through an open call, members of the public, activists, and professional photographers were invited to submit photographs with supporting short stories capturing what they perceived as climate change impacts and possible solutions in their communities. This resulted in a public exhibition and the publication of selected works in a climate photography book. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from environmental communication, visual studies and public engagement, this article analyses the project using key elements from the climate change communication literature indicating strengths in locally grounded storytelling, inclusivity and cultural relevance. It also acknowledges methodological constraints such as the absence of systematic participant evaluation, a recurring gap in climate communication practice. Lessons learned for practice and participation emphasize the value of visual participatory methods in amplifying public voices, bridging scientific and lived experience, and expanding climate discourse in low-resource settings.
