The climate crisis is a children’s education crisis. Extreme weather events destroy or damage schools, learning materials, and vital infrastructure, making it difficult for children to keep learning.
Multiple indirect effects on children’s education, including increased risks of malnutrition, disruption of livelihoods, and negative health impacts, inhibit children from attending school. Without immediate action to address climate change, the global learning crisis is likely to intensify; by the same token, quality education can in fact support climate action by boosting the resilience of students and their communities to adapt and respond to climate change.
On April 13, 2024 the Center for Universal Education (CUE) and the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) co-hosted an event at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. to help advance discourse on climate change and the education nexus. At the event, GPE launched the Climate Smart Education Systems Framework, which outlines a concrete action agenda to strengthen the resilience and relevance of education to climate change and environmental degradation.
The Climate Smart Education Systems Framework is a framework to advance climate smart education. It unifies a lot of the different silos that are working to achieve the sustainable development goal 4 of Quality Education- from green skills, to renewable energy to gender equality, it brings everyone together.
GPE is a partnership for education and a good opportunity to mainstream the awareness around climate change. This is important because development is in silos. There is education, climate change, gender equality, health etc. Education is a great way to tie everything together and make sense of the challenges and bridge some of these silos because none of the sustainable development goals is actually stand-alone; all of them are intertwined.
At the same time as education advocates, we are thinking, what are the right instruments that can be used to amplify our voices. The Education sector through the framework of advocacy is a fantastic way to help pass our message to many quarters through the media.
So this framework is great because it does many things, it is a simple, user-friendly type of document that has the beauty of concentrating together the lots of good practices and ideas leaving many governments with the opportunity to tailor and adjust these practices to their unique challenges and country.
Schools are fantastic ways to pass a message to a large number of citizens. The reality is that there are many things we are doing currently in our day-to-day lives that have a negative effect on the environment and the natural resources that we are using improperly?
What pathway can you use to reach so many citizens, create awareness and make them great ambassadors of good use of resources better than the school? Think of the multiplier effect of the message that has been included in the curricula in schools and making sure that these good practices are adopted by everyone in their daily lives.
Till today, there is a still a particular way I do long division because there was a way I was taught in school, I like to believe that children usually go abc home and become ambassadors of these practices in their families and household because now, I teach my cousins the same method I was taught almost 15 years. This is how you create a multiplier effect which starts in the classroom and then penetrates into other areas of the society.
In many countries, there are no other ways to reach as many people in one go as the education system, this is why the climate crisis is a children’s education crisis. If we are not reaching the children, we are really not closing the gap for climate action to take place.