1 [Editor(s) here] (ed.), [Book Titlen here], 1—8. © 日a Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 1 VILCHES, A., 2 GIL-PEREZ, D., 3 EDWARDS, M., 4 PRAIA, J. SCIENCE TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF THE CURRENT SITUATION OF PLANETARY EMERGENCY 1,2,3 Universitat de València, Spain, 4 Universidade de Porto, Portugal ABSTRACT During the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio in 1992 educators of every subject were asked to contribute to public awareness and understanding of the problems and challenges related to our planet's future, in order to make possible citizens' participation in well grounded decision-making. The purpose of our contribution is to analyse what science teachers' perceptions are, because without correct teacher perception of the planetary crisis and its possible solutions, we can't expect their effective implication in this dimension of education. 1. BACKGROUND, AIMS AND FRAMEWORK Until the second half of the 20th Century, our planet seemed very large, practically without limits, and the effects of human activities remained locally compartmentalised (Fien 1995). But these compartments have begun to dissolve during the last decades, and many problems (greenhouse effect, ozone depletion, acid rain…) have acquired a global dimension (Bybee 1991; Orr 1995). The "state of the world" has become, for this reason, an object of growing concern. This is the reason why educators are being asked to contribute to public awareness and understanding of the problems and challenges related to our planet's future, in order to make possible citizens' participation in well grounded decision-making (United Nations 1992). Our hypothesis is that, in spite of such dramatic appeals, attention paid by science teachers to the state of the world is still very poor and constitutes a serious missing dimension in science teachers education and, more generally, in science education research and innovation (Gayford 1993; Gil-Pérez 2000). Our purpose is, very precisely, to analyse what science teachers' perceptions are, because without correct teacher perception of the planetary crisis and its possible solutions, we can't expect their effective implication in this dimension of education. This analysis demands, firstly, to clarify what we understand by a correct view of the state of the world. If we want to understand correctly the current situation of planetary emergency and how to act upon it, it seems necessary to go beyond the consideration of some concrete or local environmental problems. As Tilbury (1995) signals, “environmental and development problems are not solely caused by physical and biological factors” and “an understanding of the parts played by aesthetic, social,