**1. Introduction**

We begin this chapter by taking the concept of cognition as a reference, as it is closely related to social representations as a useful study perspective for understanding how society appropriates the causes, consequences and solutions related to climate change. Cognition is the ability of living beings to process information and give it meaning, based on stimuli we receive from the environment through the senses. Thanks to this capacity, human beings assimilate and organise the information they receive in order to convert it into knowledge, through a series of mental processes such as perception, emotions, reasoning and language. These processes have a social dimension linked to communication, which makes it possible for us to interact with others to reach a consensus on ways of interpreting and explaining the world, its phenomena and events, and to articulate how to act accordingly.

These processes of interaction take on special relevance in a dynamic and changing world, constantly subject to social, environmental, economic and cultural transformations in which science and technology play an increasingly important role.

In order to internalise and interpret these changes, we rely unevenly on cultural constructions and scientific evidence that we incorporate into our cognitive baggage through frameworks of interpretation of facts, phenomena and events that give rise to shared representations in which the weight exerted by the influence of common culture is superimposed and often hinders an understanding of certain aspects of reality - for example, climate change - based on the appropriate appropriation of available scientific knowledge. Through processes of conceptual appropriation, linguistic meaning and cultural anchoring, we construct worldviews that translate into habits, behaviours, attitudes and lifestyles with which we confront the environmental problems of our surroundings on a daily basis, without realising that some of these cultural inertias are currently leading us to unprecedented environmental degradation that is causing, among other things, climate change. Clarifying the weight that these cultural constructions exert over scientific narratives in our way of understanding and explaining "objects" of a complex nature is an important challenge to promote changes that will allow us to reverse the impacts and alterations derived from anthropogenic climate change.

The research we present aims to understand to what extent the similarities and differences between what people think, from the individual to the collective, and the body of scientific knowledge available on climate phenomena and their anthropogenic alteration can be explained in relation to their causes, processes, consequences and solutions.

We justify the social relevance of this approach on the basis of the concept of a climate tipping point, i.e. the possibility of exceeding or having exceeded thresholds in climate change that can lead to abrupt or irreversible changes [1]. Several interconnected hotspots experiencing such changes have now been identified in the Amazon rainforest, the boreal forest, permafrost, Arctic sea ice and the Great Barrier Reef, among others [2].

The overshooting of these equilibrium limits is already causing millions of people to suffer the consequences of CC in the form of extreme poverty, migration, inequality, etc. Perhaps for this reason, shortly before COP25 in Spain, the European Parliament declared a climate emergency in the European Union, making it the first continent to do so.

Despite the alarming warnings provided by climate science and available scientific research, in general the governments of our countries have not incorporated anthropogenic CC as a priority issue in political agendas, so that communication of the emergency has been restricted to the spheres of scientific research and its threat potential has barely reached the general public. Nor has it been included as a priority in areas such as the economic, social, cultural or educational spheres, delaying the administrations from generating a flow of relevant information for society.

This flow has been discontinuous and, on many occasions, without meaningfully connecting society with climate science, resulting in different beliefs about climate change and a common culture around it that generates confusion, doubts and uncertainty.

And given that the social response to the threat posed by climate change depends more on how people and human collectives interpret and value it than on the representations that science constructs of it, it is therefore essential to understand how social representations of this phenomenon are being formed, as a basis for addressing the challenges involved in education and communication. Focusing this work on the study of representations of climate change in university students is justified because these are people who are at the most advanced levels of the educational system, which presupposes that they are people with a greater critical capacity to analyse the information they receive about CC and to discriminate its veracity and scientific rigour.

#### *Social Representation of Climate Change among Young Spanish University Students DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98258*

On the other hand, in a climate emergency scenario, universities must assume the responsibility of incorporating this situation into the training of their students in order to make them understand their responsibilities and their leadership role in the different disciplinary fields and social spheres in which they will have to work professionally.

Finally, this research is justified by the social diversity incorporated in the territorial and cultural contexts from which the samples of university students used are drawn. It is well known that the effects of climate change are cross-border and global, but they do not have the same impact in some areas of the planet as in others, so that the representation of the threat and the perception of risk may be different in each context.

In terms of the originality of the study, we can affirm that this research aims to explore other variants of what has already been studied so far in order to provide new data and broaden knowledge in this field.

On the basis that the study aims to deepen the understanding of the cognitive and socio-cultural processes involved in the representation of an "object" that is originally generated in the scientific field, the CC, this work aims to delve into the differences that may exist in the representation within the university community. More specifically, its novelty lies in checking how higher academic training can intervene and influence the social construction of SRs of CC, considering as a central hypothetical question the differences that may appear depending on the branch of knowledge, the degree and the academic year that students are studying and, therefore, their greater or lesser proximity to those scientific fields related to climate and its anthropic alteration.

On the other hand, we have innovated in the exploration of the territory/sociocultural variable, making comparisons between university students who, being from different countries (i.e. Spain and Portugal), are considered at the same time within a common territory (which is the Iberian Peninsula) and yet experience different climatological characteristics on the north/south axis and belong to different socio-cultural and academic spheres.

Another novelty of this work is to use a measurement tool based on the best scientific literature on the causes, consequences, biophysical processes and solutions to climate change, relating it to some of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals proposed by the United Nations in Resolution 70/1 (2015), such as the SDGs associated with water and health.

Finally, another unique feature of this research is the multidisciplinary perspective it adopts. Climate change must be considered from an interdisciplinary perspective, as the causes that lead to it, the biophysical processes that shape it, its consequences and possible solutions are closely related, as it requires a complex approach that encompasses disciplines ranging from physics and biology to psychology and economics, among others. It is therefore essential to combine the contributions of the social and human sciences with those of the natural and technological sciences in order to tackle the climate crisis. In this way, and in the case in point, universities can be considered as tools for change, because education can change individual and social conceptions and enable the transformation of society. Furthermore, the perception of climate change is determined by many factors, but one of the most decisive in analysing it lies in education.

There is evidence based on research results that show that the common culture surrounding the phenomenon of climate change may have a greater influence than its scientific representation because the weight of certain variables associated with the ways in which this common culture is constructed in advanced societies generates differences in the degree of importance given to the phenomenon [3, 4]. Thus, we propose with this study to explore the social representation of climate change

in university students through different variables, which allow us to clarify some relevant aspects of these processes linked to the context of university education:

