Picture this: you’re 17 years old, sitting in a community youth centre somewhere in Europe. Someone hands you a controller and tells you that the choices your character makes in the next hour will shape the fate of a fictional city threatened by environmental collapse. You choose to investigate who’s responsible for the pollution in the local river. You build alliances. You call out greenwashing. You organise a protest.
It’s a game, but the skills you’re practising are very real.
This is the heart of EcoQuest 2, an Erasmus+ project that uses game-based learning to develop environmental competences in young people aged 16 to 25. And the framework that makes this possible, the blueprint that turns “sustainability” from a buzzword into something teachable, measurable and actionable, is called the GreenComp.
A common language for a complex challenge
Most of us care about the planet. But caring isn’t enough. Between the urgency we feel when watching news about climate change and the actual capacity to do something about it, there’s a gap; a gap made of missing skills, unclear pathways, and a sense of powerlessness. (Bianchi et al., 2022; Demssie et al., 2023)
The GreenComp was designed precisely to bridge that gap.
Developed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre as part of the European Green Deal, GreenComp is the European reference framework for sustainability competences. It offers a shared, concrete definition of what it means to be “competent” in sustainability and, crucially, how those competences can be developed through education and training in any context: formal, non-formal or informal (Bianchi et al., 2022).
The GreenComp was designed precisely to bridge that gap. Developed by the European Commission as part of the Green Deal, it identifies 12 sustainability competences organised into four interconnected areas: embodying sustainability values, embracing complexity, envisioning sustainable futures, and acting for sustainability (Bianchi et al., 2022).
Each area represents a different dimension of what it means to genuinely engage with sustainability. The first anchors learning in personal values and a sense of connection to nature. The second builds the cognitive tools to navigate messy, “wicked” problems, with systems thinking at the centre. A competence that researchers identify as one of the most important and most difficult to develop, precisely because it is not intuitive and must be cultivated explicitly through experience (Demssie et al., 2023). The third invites learners to imagine alternative futures rather than just catalogue crises. And the fourth, political agency, collective action, individual initiative, is where values and vision finally converge into movement (Bianchi et al., 2022).
Not just a framework – a pedagogy
What makes the GreenComp particularly interesting for youth workers and educators is not just what it identifies, but what it implies about how to teach. A framework built on systems thinking, futures literacy and political agency cannot be delivered through passive lectures. It demands active, experiential, learner-centred approaches.
The research on this is consistent. Demssie et al. (2023) explored how combinations of innovative learning approaches (field trips, collaborative learning and mobile learning) could foster systems thinking competence in authentic real-world environments. Their findings point to something important: no single method is sufficient. It is the combination of approaches, applied in genuine contexts where social, environmental and economic dimensions are visibly intertwined, that enables learners to appreciate the kind of complex interconnections that systems thinking requires. Traditional classroom-based instruction, by contrast, tends to keep learners passive and learning confined (precisely the opposite of what sustainability education needs).
For non-formal education, the implication is clear: structured, active, and engaging tools make a difference. Awareness alone doesn’t build competence. Experience does. And as the Replay Network (2024) notes in their work on adapting the GreenComp for the youth field, making these competences accessible outside formal education contexts means translating abstract frameworks into lived experiences where young people can actually practise making decisions, negotiating values and imagining alternatives.
Enter EcoQuest 2: learning by playing
EcoQuest 2 is built on a simple but powerful premise: games are one of the most effective spaces for developing exactly the kind of competences the GreenComp describes.
The project’s narrative video game, playable in 40 to 60-minute sessions, shows players how social norms evolve in a human network. They have to think in systems not because they’re told to, but because the game won’t make sense otherwise. Systems thinking, critical thinking, futures literacy: practised as tools for navigating a world that feels real enough to care about.
The project’s LARP scenario takes the learning off the screen and into the room. In a one to three-hour Live Action Role-Playing experience, young people physically embody characters navigating an environmental crisis together. They negotiate, argue, find common ground, decide collectively what to do next. This is not just knowing about political agency and collective action. It is practising them. And that is a different kind of learning, and a more lasting one.
Together, the video game and the LARP create a progression across all four GreenComp areas. From values and complexity, through vision to action, in a way that feels meaningful to young people because the learning emerges from the experience rather than being imposed on top of it.
REFERENCES
Bianchi, G., Pisiotis, U. and Cabrera Giraldez, M., GreenComp – The European sustainability competence framework, Punie, Y. and Bacigalupo, M. (eds.), EUR 30955 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2022, ISBN 978-92-76-46485-3, doi:10.2760/13286, JRC128040.
Demssie, Y. N., Biemans, H. J. A., Wesselink, R., & Mulder, M. (2023). Fostering students’ systems thinking competence for sustainability by using multiple real-world learning approaches. Environmental Education Research, 29(2), 261–286. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2022.2141692
Martínez-Agut, M.P., Monzó-Martínez, A. and Ortiz-Cermeño, E. (2025). Assessment of GreenComp learning in the training of education professionals. Frontiers in Education, 10:1608850. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1608850
Replay Network. (2024, November 30). SUSTAIN-ABILITY: Shaping Green COMP for the youth field. https://www.replaynet.eu/en/sustain-ability