Youth demands for quality climate change education

The Greening Education Partnership was launched at the 2022 UN Transforming Education Summit, with the aim of getting every learner climate-ready to contribute to the global efforts for coordinated actions through the Partnership, UNESCO is undertaking the “Greening Every School” project, the first component of which entails co-developing a green curriculum guide with young people. This project is consists of in two phases; 1) compiling youth demands and 2) translating youth demands into a curriculum guide for policy-makers and educators. This document presents the outcome of the first phase which focuses on gathering youth voices.

Key findings

• The quality of the current climate change education is in question. Seventy per cent of the youth surveyed say that they cannot explain climate change, or can only explain its broad principles, or do not know anything about it, putting into question the quality of climate change education in our schools today.
• The younger the respondents, the higher the level of satisfaction of their learning experiences on climate change education.
• Girls have less confidence in dealing with climate change based on what they learnt in school compared to boys.

Youth Demands

• Climate change education that helps them to understand, to take better action on climate change and to recognize the human place within nature.
• Diverse aspects of climate change taught across subjects in an interdisciplinary manner to address complexity and interlinkages.
• Learner-centred, experiential and reflective ways of learning making climate change education more fun, solutions-based and action-oriented.
• That their teachers are well supported to become ready to teach climate change. They are concerned that teachers are not confident enough and have limited resources to teach about climate change.
• That schools be important learning spaces for climate change.
• More say in decision-making on climate change action in school.
• Contextualized climate change education through engagement with the local community.
• Specificities of their geographic and demographic contexts be addressed. Youth coming from Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in particular demand more climate change education than is currently offered.