Experts Build a Detection Tool to Expose Greenwashing Hidden in School Environmental Programs

As public anxiety over the climate and biodiversity crisis intensifies, companies and institutions have rushed to present themselves as environmental champions. One of the least visible arenas in which this competition for green credibility now plays out is the classroom. Across many countries, businesses, foundations, and utilities offer schools free environmental education projects and programs, complete with teaching materials, workshops, and branded activities. While some of these offerings are pedagogically sound, others serve a very different purpose: polishing the image of organizations whose core activities harm the environment. Researchers call this strategy greenwashing, and a new study argues that schools have had almost no systematic way to detect it.

A team at the University of Balearic Islands in Spain has now designed and validated a practical instrument for exactly that task. Olaya Álvarez-García, Mireia Costa-Bisquerra, and Antoni Cerdà-Navarro, all based in the Department of Applied Pedagogy and Educational Psychology, set out to build a tool that can both identify deceptive practices and assess the overall quality of environmental education projects and programs offered to schools. Their work, published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, responds to a growing body of evidence that environmentally damaging companies are increasingly targeting education systems as a channel for reputation management.

The methodological backbone of the study is the Delphi method, a structured consensus technique widely used when direct observation or experimentation is impractical. Rather than surveying a random sample, the researchers convened a panel of ten experts in environmental education and environmental communication. The panel worked through two iterative rounds of questionnaire-result-questionnaire consultation. In each round, experts rated proposed criteria and indicators; the aggregated results were fed back to the panel, allowing participants to reconsider their judgments in light of the group’s collective response. This feedback loop, a hallmark of Delphi design, progressively narrows disagreement and builds content validity, meaning the extent to which an instrument genuinely measures the concept it claims to measure.

The raw material for the criteria came from established theoretical frameworks on greenwashing and on quality in environmental education. The greenwashing literature offers a rich taxonomy of deceptive techniques, from selective disclosure and symbolic actions to vague, unsubstantiated environmental claims. Classic analyses, including the well-known ‘sins of greenwashing’ reports and subsequent systematic reviews, describe how organizations emphasize minor green attributes while obscuring far larger environmental footprints. Quality frameworks in environmental education, meanwhile, developed by bodies such as the North American Association for Environmental Education and various Spanish and Catalan agencies, specify what sound programs should contain: scientific accuracy, pedagogical rigor, clear objectives, and alignment with learners’ developmental needs.

After two Delphi rounds, the panel converged on a final instrument comprising eight criteria and forty-three indicators. Each criterion represents a dimension along which an environmental education program can be judged, and each indicator is an observable signal that evaluators can look for when reviewing program materials, funding arrangements, and stated objectives. The indicators span both poles of the problem: they flag red-warning features associated with greenwashing, such as promotional content that diverts attention from a sponsor’s environmental record, and they certify positive quality markers, such as accurate treatment of ecological concepts and the absence of covert advertising. Agreement statistics, including interrater measures commonly reported with Cohen’s kappa, supported the coherence of the panel’s judgments across rounds.

Why does this matter for schools? The researchers point to investigative journalism and prior scholarship documenting how some of the companies with the largest carbon footprints in Spain have entered classrooms to deliver climate education. Studies of what has been termed ‘petro-pedagogy’ describe how fossil fuel interests obstruct climate justice in public education by framing curricula around individual responsibility rather than systemic change. Experimental research further shows that greenwashing can measurably improve public attitudes toward corporations’ sustainability initiatives, even when those initiatives are hollow. Children, who lack the advertising literacy and background knowledge to interrogate a program’s funding or framing, are particularly receptive audiences, and teachers rarely have the time or resources to audit every free program that arrives at their door.

The new tool is designed to change that calculus. By giving teachers and educators a structured checklist grounded in expert consensus, it converts a diffuse suspicion, something feels off about this program, into a systematic evaluation. A teacher can ask whether a program’s environmental claims are substantiated, whether the sponsor’s own practices align with the messages being taught, whether the materials promote critical thinking or brand loyalty, and whether the pedagogy meets recognized quality standards. The authors emphasize that the instrument is also intended for professional development, helping pre-service and in-service teachers build the evaluative skills needed to navigate an increasingly crowded market of externally provided educational content.

Conceptually, the study makes a second, broader argument: that detecting greenwashing in education requires an interdisciplinary lens. Greenwashing has traditionally been studied in marketing and corporate communication, where researchers analyze advertising claims, stakeholder perceptions, and reputational strategy. Environmental education research, by contrast, focuses on learning outcomes, curriculum design, and teacher competence. The Balearic Islands team deliberately bridges these fields, importing the analytical vocabulary of greenwashing research into educational evaluation. The result is a tool that treats an environmental education program not just as a pedagogical artifact but as a communication product with a sponsor, a message, and potentially a hidden agenda.

The timing is significant. European survey data show strong public concern for the environment, and international frameworks, from the Paris Agreement to UNESCO’s Berlin Declaration on Education for Sustainable Development, position education as central to the sustainability transition. Yet the same visibility that makes environmental education a policy priority also makes it an attractive target for image-conscious polluters. As pressure to demonstrate climate action grows, so does the incentive to sponsor lessons that simulate action. Instruments like the one developed here offer a modest but concrete defense: a way for the education sector to distinguish genuine learning opportunities from sophisticated public relations, and to insist that what enters the classroom serves students rather than sponsors.

The researchers acknowledge that their panel of ten experts, while sufficient for establishing content validity through the Delphi process, represents a starting point rather than an endpoint. Future work will need to test the tool’s reliability and usefulness in real-world school settings, across different national contexts and program types. Still, the study delivers something the field has lacked: a validated, expert-consensus framework that names the criteria deceptive programs fail and quality programs meet. In a media environment saturated with green claims, giving educators the means to verify before they trust may prove one of the most quietly consequential contributions of environmental education research this year.

Subject of Research: Design and validation of a Delphi-based tool to identify greenwashing and assess quality in environmental education programs offered to schools

Article Title: Greenwashing and quality in environmental education: Design of a tool to identify deceptive practices through the application of the delphi method

Article References: Álvarez-García, O., Costa-Bisquerra, M., & Cerdà-Navarro, A. (2026). Greenwashing and quality in environmental education: Design of a tool to identify deceptive practices through the application of the delphi method. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01142-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01142-8

Keywords: greenwashing, environmental education, Delphi method, sustainability education, corporate influence in schools, education quality assessment, climate education, teacher training, environmental communication, content validity, school programs, University of Balearic Islands