UN climate body, UNESCO launch education webinar series to strengthen skills

Photo caption: School Children     Credit: Johannesburg-School children learning about agriculture and farming-shutterstock

UNESCO and UN Climate Change launched the third of their climate change education webinar series this week, which will convene more than 1,500 people worldwide, including teachers, educators, and policymakers worldwide over the next six months to discuss how to strengthen capacities in integrating climate change and sustainability into teaching, learning and education systems.

This series, which will run from May to December 2024, will see webinar participants discuss how to strengthen policy, planning and financing with a focus on enhancing teacher training programmes and bolstering the resilience of education systems.

The new series is particularly timely, coming off the back of a UNESCO global survey of 17,000 young people, which showed that 70% of respondents said they felt poorly prepared to face the challenges of climate change based on what they have learned in school.

The good news is that this survey concludes that there is a strong desire among young people for comprehensive climate change education. They seek not just knowledge but actionable understanding to tackle the challenges brought by climate change. Furthermore, a UNESCO study shows a similar interest in educators, as 95% of teachers surveyed considered teaching about climate change to be extremely important.

“At one point – climate education was simply about science. Understanding our atmospheric system. The complex relationship between the sun, sea, forest, and air. The drivers of change and its impacts. Now education in the age of climate change is very different,” said Simon Stiell, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary, in an address to the UNESCO Executive Board in Paris this week. “Our task is to educate and inspire a new generation of professionals. To embed an understanding of climate change and the solutions to it in every aspect of education.”

The webinars, which will be accessible to the public and available here, will cover strategies to empower educators in imparting knowledge about climate change to children and adolescents, fostering skills relevant to green employment, and advancing environmentally conscious teacher training and education system capacities.

“In the case of Honduras, the Ministry of Education is reforming the curricula. We are working on raising awareness about climate change and the specific impact it has on our country,” added Alana Domínguez from the Honduran Ministry of Education, who welcomed the UNESCO and UN Climate Change initiative. “We believe that teachers also need to be trained regularly so that they can explain how climate change requires a holistic systemic approach.”

Getting every teacher and learner worldwide climate-ready!

The Greening teacher training and education systems’ capacities series is part of a larger series of webinars that started in 2022. The series feeds into achieving the goals of the Greening Education Partnership (GEP) that was launched at the UN Transforming Education Summit in September 2022 as a global initiative to deliver strong, coordinated, and comprehensive action. The inaugural series in 2022 concentrated on greening education policies and curricula in the lead up to COP27, while the subsequent series in 2023 focused on greening schools in the road to COP28.

Speaking in the first session of this third webinar series, Ahmad El Baghdadi, a primary school teacher from Lebanon, said: “It is really important to have curriculum reforms when we talk about including climate education. In the project we are running, we are taking a cross-curricular approach where we include climate education within all subjects, like math and science, and not as a separate subject.”

The overarching goal of the Greening Education Partnership is to equip every learner in every school worldwide to be climate-ready. This ambition is underpinned by four key pillars of action: Greening Schools, Greening Curricula, Greening Teacher Training and Education System Capacities, and Greening Communities.

UN Climate Change is co-implementing this webinar series through the ACE Hub, a three-year collaboration of the UN Climate Change secretariat and the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia in 2022 to promote education and awareness-raising, training, public access to information and participation in climate action worldwide.

In addition, at the June UN climate change meetings (SB60), Parties and other stakeholders will hold discussions on the inclusion of climate change in education systems at all levels, from early childhood to professional education, including in lifelong learning. Among other things, the ACE Dialogue and ACE Poster Gallery will explore the perspectives of teachers, policy-makers, educators, youth and children on improving the capacities of the education system to deliver high quality climate change learning.