The Need for Climate-Smart Education Financing: A review of the evidence and new costing framework

This joint report by Save the Children and GPE reviews the literature on the bidirectional relationship between the climate crisis and funding for education and presents a new tool – the Climate and Environment Intervention Matrix (CEIM) – to help governments and donors understand the cost implications of building climate-smart education systems.

In part 1 of this report the authors explored the literature on this topic and concluded: 1. Data and evidence on the additional costs of the climate crisis to education beyond individual case studies are lacking; 2. While there is a strong body of evidence on the savings realized from implementing disaster risk reduction interventions and preparedness more broadly, there is a gap in the evidence for the cost of different climate-smart investments in education and their relative benefits; 3. There is a substantial amount of data highlighting that climate and education strategies are not well integrated.

Given these findings, we sought to support efforts to build climate-smart education systems across the world by introducing the CEIM in Part 2 of this report. The CEIM is a tool intended for policymakers, planners, donors and other education stakeholders that can be used to understand the cost implications of building climate-smart education systems. It is built on a review of the existing literature that discusses the relative costs and data of different interventions that would support the development of climate-smart education systems.