Curriculum and content

increase learners’ awareness of the climate emergency, injustice and inequalities. It develops critical thinking about causes, consequences, and sustainable solutions and actions.

Transformative education provides critical knowledge and life skills that people and societies need to navigate the unpredictability and complexity that the climate crisis is causing. Learning about the climate crisis, its causes, future scenarios and differential impacts on people and societies supports adaptive capacity in children and young people and helps them understand connections between different types of inequality. This include the inequality caused by climate change and how these inequalities are interlinked. It is important to target girls and young people, especially those from marginalised communities, who often have fewer educational opportunities and ways to receive vital information and develop relevant skills.

Education for sustainability and climate justice needs to be mainstreamed into all topics and educational levels beyond natural science. This includes economic, arts, literature, maths, geography, social science, and history. It implies a new way of analysing and seeing things and adopting a global perspective and approach in education rather than the existing nation-state-focused view. This is because the actions we take in one place in the world have a huge impact on other parts of the world, especially on the people least responsible for the changes.  

Climate education requires transformative learning – not just learning about the climate emergency but learning to address the climate emergency. This can be done by equipping children, young people, and adults to change their behaviour and organize and act for change.