Experts call for climate justice-focussed lessons in schools to help children adapt to ongoing crisis

Climate education in schools can make children resilient to the ongoing crisis and bring about carbon emission reductions, experts tell Vishwam Sankaran ahead of COP27

Protesters of Fridays For Future during the climate strike march on October 1, 2021 in Milan, Italy (Getty Images)

On a warm summer evening in April, a group of class eight students from a government corporation school in the southern Indian city of Chennai hosted a play titled Time for Change.

The student group that goes by the name Thenikuzhu – meaning a bee swarm inTamil – wrote the script for the climate change-themed play themselves and performed for a packed auditorium, with tickets selling for about $2 each.

Tenikuzhu’s science-fiction play involves a diverse group of scientists, who invent a time machine, travel to the future, and return dejected about the fate of the planet. The quest of how the young minds use their new invention to fix the planet forms the main plot of the thoroughly captivating play peppered with anecdotes of real climate justice events of the present and the past.

“We chose the name Thenikuzhu for our class because honey bees are a keystone species, and we felt the kids are the keystones for climate action,” Meera B, a former Teach for India fellow, who teaches the class of about 80 students, tells The Independent.

A keystone species is one that has a disproportionately large impact on the ecosystem relative to its population size.

“Initially the kids were provided a classroom exercise to write essays, and one of them wrote about how she’d go back in time and solve a few issues. From this, my co-teacher Nikita and I got an idea to connect time travel and climate change, which we gave kids as a prompt for writing the play. The rest, they did by themselves,” Ms Meera says.

The Chennai-based teacher believes bringing the climate change discourse to classrooms via art and activities is crucial in combating the global crisis.

Thenikuzhu performing Time For Change – a sci-fi play on climate change’s past, present, and future (Vishwam Sankaran)

One approach teachers could take to introduce the discourse to students in resource-limited schools, that are already short of staff, is to incorporate climate change concepts into the subjects they already teach.

“For example, in a Math classroom exercise on calculating averages, kids were instructed to monitor the air quality index data of different neighbourhoods for a day, and we calculated the mean value of these data points,” Ms Meera explained.

Particularly, she says educators in countries like India, need to bring the discourse on climate justice to classrooms to make real progress against the crisis threatening the future of humanity.

“Most resources I find for middle school children are not easily integrateable into the local curriculum. There are exercises like maintaining water journals and calculating carbon footprint that is part of some curriculum. While these are helpful to an extent, they do not cater to the realities of these kids,” Meera says.

“The children I teach have the least impact on climate change and seem to bear the worst brunt of it. So I don’t want to teach them more of something where the onus falls on the individual. But there is more need for school programs that are focussed on what to expect from governments and industries,” she adds.

Last year, the United Nations also published a 128-page report explaining how the climate crisis is a child rights crisis with the biggest impacts felt by kids in poorer settings.

Experts agree that climate change curricula in schools should be built to suit the local needs, while also teaching some broad concepts on the realities of the crisis felt across the globe.

“First of all, they should get a basic idea of climate change and what it can cause like sea level rise, cyclones, floods, and droughts, despite where they live in. Then they can relate to these depending on the place where they live in via activities, such as talking to grandparents or people in their community, that are tailored for each classroom,” says Mala Balaji, a researcher working for the Chennai-based non-profit Climate Action at Citizen consumer and civic Action Group (CAG).

The need of the hour is also to start with the youngest age groups, experts say.

“We’re seeing quite a few climate education resources for students in middle school or high school, but for younger students, there is a huge resource gap,” says Keya Lamba, co-founder of Earth Warriors, an international organisation that seeks to empower schools to embed a solutions-based climate curriculum.

Citing recent research published in the journal PLOS One, Shweta Bahri, another co-founder of Earth Warriors, stressed that if just 16 per cent of kids in high- and middle-income countries received climate education, there could be a reduction in carbon emissions in the future by about 19 gigatons.

“COP27 in Egypt is fast approaching – we hope to see a dedicated panel discussion at the conference that addresses climate education as a valuable tool for climate action,” Ms Bahri says.

“Governments must work faster to incorporate climate education into curriculums, to create a timeline for its implementation and make it a reality for all schools. Too often it’s talked about, and nothing is ever done,” she adds.

Ms Balaji concurs.

“While climate education was one of the topics brought up in COP26, and there were lots of expectations, it kind of fizzled away and no major actions were taken,” she adds. In COP27, the CAG researcher hopes tangible goals are set to strengthen the capacity of educators and teachers across the globe to deliver accurate information to their classrooms on climate change.

Experts point out that while climate change finds cursory mention in subjects like Social Science and Environmental Studies, a separate universally-agreed pedagogy for climate change with a learning continuum is lacking in many countries.

COP27 can be a platform where these issues are addressed and tangible goals are set for introducing climate change education to classrooms.

“Every time at COP events, the outcome is lukewarm, so I am hoping something concrete comes out of this one and climate change education is at the forefront of discussions,” the Chennai-based researcher says.

COP2, experts say, can also spark progress by funneling funds towards climate education, especially for schools in resource-limited settings.

“Finance and collaborations have the potential to be the biggest accelerators of climate action. Nonprofits and other impact entities are best placed to support the on-ground implementation of climate education policies,” says Jai Warrier, co-founder of the Bangalore-based non-profit Initiative for Climate Action.

Mr Warrier says there is an urgent need via COP27 to finance the collection of more localised climate data, to make them easily accessible for educators and individuals, and for creating incentive structures for climate content creators, trainers, and others to deliver this information in classrooms.

“It is absolutely crucial to strengthen teachers’ and educators’ capacities to deliver accurate information, integrate local content, and promote critical thinking about climate change mitigation and adaptation,” Ms Balaji noted.