Medical Schools in Türkiye Are Failing to Teach Climate Change, National Survey Reveals

Climate change is no longer a distant environmental concern—it is a public health emergency unfolding in hospitals, clinics, and communities around the world. Yet a sweeping national survey of medical faculties in Türkiye has found that the physicians of tomorrow are being trained for a world that no longer exists. According to a new cross-sectional study published in BMC Medical Education, only about a quarter of undergraduate medical programs in the country fully include climate change in their curricula, leaving a striking majority of future doctors without formal preparation for one of the defining health threats of the century.

The study, led by Demet Koç and Duygu Demirbaş Keskin of the Department of Medical Education at Acıbadem Mehmet Ali Aydınlar University, together with colleagues Melike Şahiner and Levent Altıntaş, set out to map, for the first time at national scale, how Turkish medical schools are confronting the climate-health nexus. The research team distributed an online questionnaire to academic leaders responsible for undergraduate medical education across Türkiye, probing the depth of curricular integration, the perceived effectiveness of existing teaching, faculty preparedness, available educational resources, institutional strategies, and the barriers standing in the way of reform. Fifty-three faculties responded, corresponding to a response rate of 58.9 percent—an unusually broad snapshot of a national medical education system.

The headline numbers are sobering. Just 26 percent of responding faculties reported fully including climate change content in their teaching. Another 32 percent indicated only partial integration, while 42 percent reported no inclusion whatsoever. In other words, in more than four out of ten of Türkiye’s medical faculties, the health consequences of a warming planet—heat-related illness, the spread of vector-borne diseases, respiratory impacts of air pollution, water scarcity, and climate-driven displacement—simply do not appear in the training of future physicians. Where climate content does exist, it is typically embedded within pre-existing mandatory courses rather than delivered through dedicated modules, and it tends to focus on basic concepts and general health impacts rather than applied clinical skills.

The gaps run deeper than mere presence or absence of content. The survey revealed that sophisticated and increasingly essential topics are being left out almost entirely. Climate literacy—the ability to critically interpret climate science and communicate it to patients and communities—was rarely addressed. The mental health dimensions of climate change, including eco-anxiety, trauma following extreme weather events, and the psychological toll of environmental degradation, were similarly neglected. Perhaps most strikingly, climate communication—teaching future doctors how to talk with patients and policymakers about climate-related health risks—was infrequently covered, even though physicians consistently rank among the most trusted voices in public discourse.

Faculty preparedness emerged as a critical weak point. Only 5.7 percent of respondents had received any training on how to teach climate-health content. This means that even in faculties where climate change has formally entered the curriculum, the educators delivering it are, in most cases, self-taught. Medical education researchers have long recognized that curriculum reform without parallel faculty development tends to produce shallow, inconsistent teaching, and the Turkish data conform precisely to that pattern. Without structured training programs, conference workshops, or institutional incentives to build climate-health teaching capacity, early adoption risks being symbolic rather than substantive.

Institutional support was similarly thin. Few faculties reported having dedicated structures—such as curriculum committees tasked with planetary health, designated coordinators, or formal policies—that could drive sustained integration. Student-led initiatives, which have proven to be powerful engines of curriculum change in other countries and in international assessment frameworks such as the Planetary Health Report Card, were likewise rare in Türkiye. The absence of these structural scaffolds suggests that even motivated individual faculty members face an uphill battle: without administrative backing, protected time, and dedicated resources, isolated efforts rarely translate into durable curricular reform.

Perhaps the most telling finding concerns perception. When asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the climate education currently offered at their institutions, 48.4 percent of respondents rated it as ineffective. Yet this pessimism coexists with a striking consensus on the importance of the topic: over 80 percent of respondents rated climate change education as important for medical students, and 83 percent supported the development of a national guidance tool to help faculties integrate climate-health content in a standardized way. That gap—between widespread recognition of importance and pervasive dissatisfaction with delivery—captures the central dilemma of climate education in medical training today. Awareness is not the problem. Structure, resources, and coordination are.

The barriers identified by respondents reflect challenges familiar to curriculum reformers worldwide. Overcrowded curricula leave little room for new content in programs already packed with biomedical science, clinical rotations, and licensing requirements. The absence of national learning objectives or standardized guidance means each faculty must invent its own approach, producing fragmentation and duplication of effort. Limited teaching materials in the local language, scarce expertise, and low institutional prioritization compound the problem. The authors of the study conclude that climate change education in Türkiye’s undergraduate medical programs remains fragmented, underdeveloped, and inconsistently implemented, and that structural and pedagogical barriers are actively hindering progress despite growing awareness.

Why does this matter beyond Türkiye? The World Health Organization has described climate change as the single biggest health threat facing humanity, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has documented escalating impacts on food and water security, infectious disease patterns, and extreme heat mortality. Health systems themselves are both vulnerable to these impacts and significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, placing physicians at the center of both adaptation and mitigation. International bodies, including the Association for Medical Education in Europe, have urged medical schools to embed planetary health across the training pipeline. A physician who cannot recognize heat stroke in a changing climate, counsel patients during air quality emergencies, or anticipate shifting disease vectors is, by any modern standard, incompletely trained. The Turkish findings therefore serve as a warning for many countries where climate-health education has been championed in declarations and position papers but has yet to reach the lecture hall.

The study’s authors point toward a clear path forward. A coordinated national strategy—anchored by the guidance tool that 83 percent of surveyed educators support—could establish minimum competencies in climate and health, provide ready-made curricular materials, and give faculties a shared framework for implementation. Parallel faculty development initiatives would address the training deficit revealed by the 5.7 percent figure, while institutional investment in dedicated structures and student engagement could sustain momentum over time. The researchers emphasize that undergraduate medical education plays a foundational role in shaping future physicians, and that integrating climate-health content has become an urgent priority. If the medical profession is expected not only to understand the health effects of climate change but also to lead mitigation, adaptation, and advocacy efforts, that preparation must begin in medical school. Türkiye’s national survey has measured the distance between aspiration and reality—and, in doing so, has handed educators, policymakers, and professional bodies a detailed map of exactly what must change.

Subject of Research: Climate change education in undergraduate medical curricula in Türkiye

Article Title: Climate change education in undergraduate medical faculties in Türkiye: a national descriptive cross-sectional study

Article References: Koç, D., Keskin, D. D., Şahiner, M., & Altıntaş, L. (2026). Climate change education in undergraduate medical faculties in Türkiye: a national descriptive cross-sectional study. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10395-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10395-4

Keywords: climate change, medical education, Türkiye, undergraduate curriculum, planetary health, curriculum integration, faculty preparedness, cross-sectional study, BMC Medical Education, health impacts, faculty development, national survey