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September 4, 2024
How education can equip young people to address climate change
As temperatures soar and floods ravage communities in Mozambique, young people are not only threatened physically and economically, they are also grappling with an invisible enemy—climate anxiety. This anxiety isn’t just about extreme weather; it’s also about an uncertain future.
In interviews, students told us they worry that “some islands will cease to exist” and that “adults don’t understand.” One student said: “My mother believes that cyclones are a great snake that blows when she passes. I explain to her that cyclones are due to climatic phenomena, and that there are things we can do.”
Mozambique is not an exception. Most adolescents around the world are experiencing deep anxiety about climate change. Eighty-three percent of youth surveyed in eight low- and middle-income countries (Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, India, Angola, Tanzania, Colombia, Senegal, and China) said that climate change makes them terrified about the future.
These young people are eager to learn more about climate change and take action to help, but many are not equipped with the knowledge and skills to do so. Nearly 88 percent of secondary school students in Bangladesh want to do something about climate change, for instance, but just 32 percent can correctly answer basic questions about it.
Education can fill the gaps
A new World Bank report, Choosing our Future: Education for Climate Action, uses data and analysis to understand the role education can play in responding to climate change as well as the challenges climate change poses to education systems. It explores how education can help propel the green transition by addressing the information, knowledge, and skills gaps that hinder climate action, and the steps countries can take to adapt education systems to a changing climate.
As the report shows, education has a key role to play in tackling climate change. It can combat misinformation and fill gaps in knowledge on related challenges and solutions, a persistent problem. For example, only 7 percent of Ugandan grade eight students can properly answer a set of six basic climate change questions. Education can solve this. It is the single strongest predictor of climate awareness: Each additional year of schooling increases climate awareness by 8.6 percent, and the effect is larger in higher quality education systems.
Education also has a vital role to play in fostering the skills needed for green transitions. Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills associated with “traditional” green sectors, like energy, are critical, but analysis in the report shows that any job in any sector can become greener with the right set of skills. Moreover, green skills are increasingly being demanded across a range of industries. In Brazil, for example, 25 percent of the required skills in online ads for jobs in the food and beverage industry are green skills such as recycling and waste management.
Investing in foundational skills
Rather than crowding out foundational skills though, climate topics should be embedded in foundational lessons. Governments and other actors should focus on building climate curricula into existing topics in ways that are understandable, accessible, and draw on local knowledge. For instance, reading lessons can include examples of the benefits of preserving forests and math lessons can integrate lessons on temperature and sea level changes. Classroom lessons can be supplemented with activities that integrate local knowledge and practical skills. In Morocco, an estimated six million students have participated in the One Student, One Tree, One School, One Forest project, learning about the environment by planting seeds and cuttings in their communities.
Governments also have a role to play. First, by investing in quality foundational learning alongside climate education. This means integrating climate topics into foundational lessons. Second, by increasing the number of students who study STEM subjects, especially women and students from marginalized groups. Third, by recognizing that not all green skills are the same as STEM skills.
STEM skills are essential in sectors that will be key to the green transition and require deep changes in practices and technologies, like agriculture or energy. But any job can contribute to this transition if workers have the right set of skills. Green skills demand is changing rapidly and jobs in diverse sectors are becoming greener with the evolution of tasks and skills. Governments should focus on improving information flows between employers and students and on increasing flexibility between academic and vocational studies. This can help young people to make informed decisions and respond to evolutions in the labor market.
Climate impacts to education
These investments will only pay off, however, if education outcomes are protected from the impacts of climate change. As high temperatures and natural disasters become more common, schools face longer and more frequent closures, with each missed day setting back children’s educational progress.
Even when schools do not close, increasing heat erodes children’s learning. Climate adaptation investments can head off these effects on learning, and estimates in our report show that governments have cost-effective options as low as a one-time investment of $18.51 per student. These cost-effective possibilities include solutions for temperature control, infrastructure resilience, remote learning during school closures, and teacher training. The first two will help reduce the likelihood of climate-related school closures and all four will help minimize climate-related learning losses.
Youth have been at the forefront of climate activism because they have the most at stake in the green transition. Education has an important role to play in facilitating and speeding that transition, and policy makers owe it to young people to leverage education for climate action.
