Education plays an important role in tackling the global climate crisis. Increasing environmental awareness and education on climate change can contribute to effective adaptation and mitigation, providing vulnerable communities with the knowledge and tools to understand climate change and its causes, as well as possible approaches to manage associated risks, it is possible to empower communities through education and reduce the adverse effects of climate change.
However, while education is key to addressing climate change, the delivery of education is itself vulnerable to climate exposure.
All types of extreme weather (drought, flooding and other climate shocks) can result in learners missing school.
Education systems and communities need resilient strategies to both adapt to climate change and reduce learning disruptions.
Solutions may entail building climate-resilient infrastructure, improving curricula, teacher training on climate disaster risk reduction, and/or socioeconomic practices that safeguard learning during climate events.
Education systems globally have different levels of preparedness for the increasing threats that climate change poses.
While many low-income countries including Zimbabwe are prone to natural disasters have disaster risk reduction policies, plans and strategies in place, these often focus on extreme weather events, earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.
Planning is less advanced when it comes to the more prolonged impacts of climate change, such as temperature increases, drought, and the wider socioeconomic challenges resulting from the new climatic conditions.
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Building resilient education systems should clearly be a top priority for policymakers in vulnerable countries.
The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) has developed a framework for what they call ‘climate-smart education systems’, and this provides a useful basis for considering how to build education system resilience to climate change. The seven features of the framework include:
i.Evidence-based policies and planning: This explores the extent to which there are policies and plans in place relating to climate change in education and education in climate change, whether there is accountability against these plans (such as monitoring frameworks), and who has clear responsibility for implementation.
- Cross-sector and internal coordination: Responding to the challenges of climate change requires multi-sectoral working. Education ministries need to work closely with ministries responsible for the environment and climate change, in addition to ministries responsible for sustainable building practices.
- Access to climate finance: Climate funds do not typically release information about the amount of money dedicated to education, and most funds are typically geared more towards energy and transport.
Supporting governments to access different funds to respond to different vulnerabilities will be increasingly important.
- Climate data and evidence for education planning: Many systems currently collect data on climate hazards and have separate systems that gather education data. Harmonising approaches to data collection, analysis and use will enable policymakers to make better-informed decisions about education and climate change.
- Safer and greener infrastructure: This refers to infrastructure that can withstand potentially extreme weather conditions and is built using sustainable materials.
- School safety and educational continuity: This considers what school safety and continuity plans are in place, and whether they adequately respond to the risks posed by climate change. This may include temporary post-disaster education centres, or more ongoing considerations around school safety.
- Curricula, pedagogy and teacher training: This considers whether climate change is taught in schools, the types of pedagogies used, and whether teachers have received adequate training to be able to support learners in learning about climate change.
To mitigate against the negative impact of climate change and other natural disasters, ministries of education need school safety and educational continuity plans, and associated guidance tools relating to the assessment of risk, risk reduction and response preparedness.
Policymakers must be agile and, if possible, try to maintain learning continuity in response to climate events.
In 2024, Nagesh and colleagues at the Centre for Global Development (CDG) published a blog post based on an analysis of the policy response to extreme climate events across South Asia.
They highlighted the tendency to respond to crises by simply closing schools rather than taking various forms of adaptive action to maintain learning continuity.
The CDG blog post commented that “education systems often don’t respond to shocks, but when they do, they usually close schools”.
Only a minority of countries included in their analysis of South Asian countries responded to shocks through adaptive measures such as temporary learning centres and remote or hybrid learning.
The continuity of education requires careful planning. In many contexts, schools may be damaged or used as temporary shelters for local community members who have lost their homes.
Planning for temporary learning facilities is particularly important in contexts where schools are in high-risk environments, and where school buildings are planned for use as temporary shelters.
As noted above, Early Warning Systems are an important component of system resilience.
The extent to which they are integrated into the education sector and used by schools as part of their approach to school safety can indicate the maturity level of a system.
Mobile phone technology can play a useful role. In Indonesia, for example, in a RISK Personal is an app for mobile phones that provides people with up-to-date information about risks, supporting anticipatory actions in the event of disasters.
This app is being used throughout the education system, from primary to upper secondary school, as part of the Disaster Safe Education Unit programme.
The knowledge and awareness of teachers is clearly important, but the extent to which climate-related content is a priority in pre-service and in-service training is variable.
A 2021 study by Unesco found that whilst most teachers surveyed believed teaching about climate change to be important, less than half (42%) believed that they were ‘very ready’ to teach education for sustainable development.
It is important to see building resilience within communities from the bottom up as aligned with, and fundamentally part of, the best approach to building system resilience.
Adopting a community-based methodology can support the use of indigenous and local knowledge and can create more ownership over adaptive practices.
Schools can act as positive examples to their local communities in showing sustainable practices.
For example, through an eco-school’s project in Abaco Island in the Bahamas, one school responded to the damage to crops and buildings caused by Hurricane Dorian in 2019 by growing their own vegetables and recycling table scraps.
The vegetables produced by the school provided the local community with fresh produce.
In conclusion, there is an urgent need to put more emphasis on climate change education within national planning, but references to the role of education also need to be meaningful and have clearly identified actions.
Current practice is variable.
There are no references to the education curriculum, teaching, learning or resilience building that mention climate change in relation to general education, although there is inclusion at the level of higher education and national research agendas.
*Ronald Zvendiya is an independent economic analyst.
These weekly articles are coordinated by Lovemore Kadenge, an independent consultant, managing consultant of Zawale Consultants (Private) Limited, past president of the Zimbabwe Economics Society and past president of the Chartered Governance & Accountancy Institute in Zimbabwe. Email: kadenge.zes@gmail.com or mobile +263 772 382 852.
