A specific type of academic lecture alters how entire fields communicate with themselves, but it doesn’t make headlines. Several of those have been given by Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson, a senior professor at the University of Gothenburg. However, one recurring theme in her recent work has been more difficult to ignore than the others: the persistent, fact-based insistence that the world’s youngest children should be included in the discussion of climate justice and that it cannot be restricted to adults.
At climate summits, this is not the kind of assertion that is met with applause. It has a gentle tone. After all, toddlers don’t sign petitions. They’re not marching. However, sentimentality has never been the foundation of Pramling Samuelsson’s argument. Her stance, which is based on decades of research on metacognition and developmental pedagogy, is that children’s ecological awareness, which they acquire between the ages of one and six, shapes the kind of citizens, voters, consumers, and community members they will eventually become. She has maintained that ignoring those formative years means losing the most neurologically flexible window of opportunity for people to develop sustainable values.
She studied how children become conscious of their own learning in her dissertation, which she finished at Gothenburg years ago. The trajectory was set by that early interest in metacognition. She repeatedly returned to the same question in her nearly two hundred publications: what do children truly understand about the world, and what happens when adults take that understanding seriously? It turns out that the response exceeded the expectations of most policymakers.
Pramling Samuelsson pushed the organization’s agenda toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals, especially Goal 4, which deals with quality education, while working closely with OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, where she became perhaps the most prominent voice linking sustainability to early learning. She used sharp framing. She claimed that teaching kids about recycling or taking nature walks was insufficient. In a 2026 chapter co-authored with Deniz Kahriman that examines toddlers’ reactions to what they refer to as a polycrisis—interconnected environmental, economic, and social breakdowns that jeopardize the well-being of future generations—she and her collaborators recently coined the term “ecological wisdom,” which is a deeper task.
In the past, foreign policy journals used to use the term “polycrisis.” People are still surprised to hear it applied to preschool curricula. However, it becomes more difficult to reject the reasoning after spending time with the research. Children who are growing up in communities where food systems are changing, in cities with deteriorating air quality, or in flood-prone areas are already experiencing the crisis. In research published through the International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education, Pramling Samuelsson directly addressed the conflict between “sheltering versus exposing,” which she defined as either pretending otherwise or completely shielding them from it.
Her influence seems to have been less noticeable than it merits. On social media, she isn’t popular. Her lectures don’t produce videos that go viral. However, there is a noticeable change in early childhood education circles in Australia, Sweden, Canada, India, and New Zealand, where her editorial and consulting roles have influenced policy discussions. Curriculum is being revised. Sustainability is being incorporated into teacher training programs as a fundamental lens rather than as an additional theme. Her work is featured prominently in the third edition of “Young Children and the Environment,” published by Cambridge University Press in 2024, alongside contributions from researchers on four continents.
It’s possible that Pramling Samuelsson’s slow, obstinate rerouting of a global conversation will be his most enduring contribution rather than any one lecture or paper. Some people are still uncomfortable with the notion that a three-year-old constructing a mud dam in a Swedish preschool courtyard is involved in something related to climate justice. But perhaps that discomfort is precisely the point. Much of the intellectual foundation will be traced back to a professor in Gothenburg who simply refused to leave children out of the equation when the world finally decides that the youngest voices matter in its biggest crisis.
