Knowledge gaps and biased beliefs concerning both climate change and climate policy represent major obstacles to the decarbonization process. Climate education may offer a scalable solution to address these barriers.

In the context of a national reform of the school curriculum in Italy, we implemented a nationwide field experiment, training thousands of secondary school teachers across thousands of schools using a staggered design. Our intervention—a comprehensive course on climate change and climate policy—goes beyond the light-touch interventions typically examined in the literature.

Using extensive survey data, we examine how the training affects teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and policy preferences and, in turn, those of their students.

Our study highlights significant initial knowledge gaps and biased beliefs about climate change among both teachers and students, and provides evidence that climate education can address them at scale. Following the intervention, teachers and students also reconsider their support for climate policies.