Education plays a key role in climate action, both in terms of raising awareness of the scale of the problem and in figuring out the best solutions. This is true for formal and informal education, and UN Climate Change understands the vital role education plays, through its Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) which helps empower the public to engage in climate action through education and training.
ACE provides a forum for diverse stakeholders to share their experiences and lessons learned through annual in-session ACE Dialogues as well as events at COPs. UN Climate Change also aims to strengthen collaborations with universities, academic institutions through the UN Climate Change and Universities Partnership Programme.
Around the world, multiple NGOs also undertake their own educational programs, training local populations in climate action best practice. In recent years more traditional educational channels have also embraced the need for comprehensive climate change education, with a host of climate change undergraduate and postgraduate courses being set up.
So, what role should formal education play in tackling the climate crisis? According to UN Climate Change’s Maria Laura Vinuela, it has a number of roles. “Formal education should give people an adequate understanding of climate change, the environment and how to live and act more sustainably,” she says. “They will then be equipped with the knowledge, skills and attitudes required to take action, live more sustainably, change patterns of consumption and production and participate effectively in policy-making to promote low-emission, climate-resilient societies and sustainable development.”
Two Masters courses in climate change – one in Dublin, one in Cape Town – offer students different ways of understanding the biggest issue humanity faces.
Located on Dublin’s northside, DCU’s MSC in Climate Change enrolled its first students in 2018, with students numbers more than tripling in that time, and an undergraduate degree course being added last year. “We started planning the programme in spring 2017,” says the course’s coordinator, Diarmuid Torney. “We had a growing cohort of staff with teaching and research interests in the area of climate change, but no teaching programmes focused specifically on climate change.”
In the five years since, much has changed. “The climate change and sustainability landscape is radically different to even five years ago,” Torney says. “Back then, nobody had yet heard of Greta Thunberg, there were no school strikes, the IPCC report on global warming of 1.5 degrees had not yet been published, and awareness of the climate crisis nowhere near where it is now.”
DCU’s course focuses on the social science and humanities dimensions of climate change. “We examine how societies are responding to climate change and how that response can be strengthened,” Torney says. “Students study the roles played by politics, regulation, law, education and the media in creating the broad societal response demanded by climate change.”
Another climate change course has been running since 2012 at the University of Cape Town. The ACDI Masters in Climate Change and Sustainable Development is a full-time, one-year course that has two compulsory core modules. The Introduction to Climate Change and Sustainable Development, module covers topics such as sustainable development; the climate system; African climate variability and change; international climate change legal frameworks; the economics of climate change and climate change financing; and climate-compatible development. The second core module is Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation, which provides in-depth coverage of adaption and mitigation from both theoretical and applied points of view.
Sheona Shackleton, Professor and Deputy Director at the University’s African Climate Initiative, says the broadness of the course is a key facet. “The way the course is structured means that students can go into either an academic or a professional pathway, so it provides them with insights into climate change and climate action, which can then be used in different career pathways,” she says. “We have students coming from a range of disciplines: engineers, economists, social science and natural science students. There’s a need to understand how these different components of climate change fit together, but you can still specialise in one area.”
The course is rooted in Africa and the local context, which is why the intersection of development and climate action is focused on throughout the course. “There’s a lot of conversation around a ‘just transition’ in South Africa – how do we move to renewables while recognising that so many jobs are reliant on the coal sector? The balances are very complex and recognising that is so important,” Shackleton adds.
“It is important to understand how development and climate change interact in an African context,” Shackleton says. “There are high degrees of poverty and inequality and a lack of basic development, weak institutions and poor governance systems, so [we need to] look at climate change within this reality, which is sometimes described as ‘Africa’s adaptation deficit.’ It is going to be very difficult to adapt to climate change if people don’t have the basics.”
Both Torny and Shackleton agree that climate education should start at a young age. “It is very important that climate change and sustainability education is incorporated across the education spectrum from primary up to third level,” Torney says. “At present here in Ireland, my understanding is that coverage of climate change is patchy. However, there was a very welcome announcement from the Irish government recently of a proposal to include a new subject, “Climate Action and Sustainable Development”, into the senior cycle secondary education system. This will be available to students in certain schools from 2024. It can’t come soon enough.”
So how does an educator balance the realities of the climate crisis with the need for some level of optimism?
“By any objective measure we are in serious trouble, but I see reasons to be hopeful,” Torney says. “Climate awareness has been growing in recent years, and climate is now a mainstream conversation in policy, business and society in a way that It wasn’t even a few years ago.”
“You have to build on where there has been success,” says Shackleton. “Positive case studies are an important part of the way we teach the course and drawing on some of the students own positives experiences. We need to recognize that it’s not too late, but we have to act now and act as a collective. There are options to move forward, even if some of them are big structural changes that seem intractable – we need changes from the bottom and the top. A lot of academics feel uncomfortable about encouraging activism, but we have seen that through activism we have made a difference.”