Connecting to Climate Change

3 November 2022

Twelve years ago, a colleague from Malawi, whose carbon emissions are tiny compared with the UK’s, told me how droughts in Malawi were devastating crops, leaving rivers dry and driving communities back into poverty. This was due to climate change. My jaw dropped. For me climate change in 2010 was something that might happen in the future if we didn’t get our acts together. This conversation was my wake-up call.

When I studied for my MSc in Development Studies back in 2005, the only reference to climate and the environment in my course was purely theoretical debate about property rights. Fast forward and the picture has completely changed, driven by relentless campaigning and the deepening climate crisis among the most affected people and areas. The people most affected by the climate crisis are those who have done the least to cause it. The people who have done the most to cause it are, for the time being, the least affected. These two strands of experience are linked together by long histories of colonialism, exploitation and racism.

Oxfam GB, where I work, has over 50 years of experience in global citizenship education. We didn’t start out by speaking on climate but, in recent years, we’ve made the climate emergency an increasingly urgent and core element of our offer to schools. In doing so we reflect the experiences of the many communities where we work around the world, not only Malawi, and the damage we’ve seen done to people’s livelihoods and quality of life.

The world is now at a tipping point if the worst impacts of a human-made climate disaster are to be averted. The good news is that the message has been harnessed upon by the UK teaching community. In January 2021 research by Teach the Future reported that 90% of teachers agreed that climate change education should be compulsory in schools. However, the less encouraging news is that 70% felt they had not yet received adequate training to deliver climate change education.

In this context it’s tempting to say that all climate education is good education, and anything is better than the five minutes of a single lecture I received on my MSc course back in 2005. However, in selecting a resource for school, I would recommend three important questions to consider:

1. Is the resource child-centred and does it encourage young people to take a creative and critical thinking approach to their learning which doesn’t treat climate as a siloed curriculum topic? Big challenges require big thinking and young people are asking their schools to step up to the plate.
2. To what extent does the resource take young people on a journey from their lived experiences to the much broader and more difficult global questions of climate justice and fairness? Climate learning often stays close to home in the local environment when the challenges are global and fundamentally about inequality and justice.
3. Does the resource create opportunities for young people to become empowered agents of change in their own lives and actively participate in solutions to the crisis they’re learning about? Climate action must move beyond tree planting and gardening, important as they are, to include holding decision makers to account and advocating for change – all within the safe spaces of the school and the curriculum.

The recent DfE (England) ‘Sustainability and climate change strategy’ thinks big and broad on climate and recognises the long-term importance of school estates and procurement alongside training for green jobs. Every school will have a designated climate lead staff member. This is all good news and a welcome start.

However, we have a further responsibility to encourage young people to explore the injustices and inequalities that have got us to where we are today. The three questions above help us to not only question what we teach about the climate but also how we teach about the climate, and ultimately how we work with children as active global citizens in a decolonised and egalitarian way.

We have never faced a more important task.

John McLaverty, Oxfam Education