When students flip the script on heat stress: A citizen science approach to enhancing heat resilience of educational institutions in Austria

Climate change is increasingly impacting the school environment through rising heat stress for students and teachers. In Austria, hot days that were once confined to July and August become more and more frequent in May, June and September. The research project “Climate Ready Schools” applies a citizen science approach to explore current conditions and develop strategies to enhance climate resilience in schools, focusing on the climate hazard of heat. 

Main strategies to improve heat resilience in schools include retrofitting of buildings, organizational and individual measures. Building-related adaptations such as external shading, active cooling systems, or nighttime ventilation require significant financial resources through public funding, long-term planning and decisions of external stakeholders. Therefore, additional resilience strategies are developed within Climate Ready Schools, helping school communities on organizational and individual levels to cope with increasing heat stress. Our research combines a status quo analysis of heat exposure in schools, a review of existing adaptation measures, outdoor microclimate analysis through simulations and drone flights, indoor and outdoor in-situ measurements, and the development of practical measures and organizational strategies. Students and teachers from six partner schools act as citizen scientists, collaborating with researchers to explore how well their schools are prepared for climate change, which adaptation measures are most effective and feasible, and which stakeholders can implement them. 

Alongside surveys, expert interviews, meteorological measurements, and microclimate simulations, a central element of the project are co-creative workshop formats, designed specifically for students and teachers in three-hour sessions. One format is explicitly designed to engage the citizen scientists in generating practical solutions to enhance climate resilience. The workshop begins with an introduction to climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience, followed by the creation of a heat map of the school to identify areas of perceived heat stress. Participants then apply the reverse brainstorming approach, flipping conventional problem-solving by generating “anti-solutions” that would make conditions unbearable and then inverting them into practical resilience measures. All suggestions are clustered in a two-dimensional matrix based on time and institutional level to prioritize actions. This participatory process shall ensure that developed measures are feasible at different school types and environments. Within an additional workshop series students are going to design outdoor spaces of their individual school grounds. The microclimatic evaluation of their designs will provide a deeper understanding of potential impacts and serve as a kick-off for discussions at individual sites. 

The research project seeks to provide a comprehensive Climate Resilience Handbook along with a Climate Resilience Check based on results of the methods mentioned above. These outputs will provide practical measures and action recommendations that schools can implement independently to reduce heat stress, while also addressing strategic measures relevant for building owners. The Climate Resilience Check will function as an easy-to-use self-assessment tool enabling schools to evaluate existing measures, identify gaps, and assess their current level of climate resilience. By combining scientific analysis with co-creation, Climate Ready Schools aims to guide schools from ad-hoc micro-adaptations toward systemic institutional resilience, contributing to a more climate-ready educational system.