Climate change education: A far fledged dream?
by: AISHWARYA RAMACHANDRAN
India has a reason to be concerned about climate change as a vast population depends on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, forestry, and fisheries for their livelihood. The adverse impact on climatic change such as the decline in rainfall and the rise in temperature has caused the severity of livelihood issues in India.
Yale University research on climatic change pointed out that 65% of the Indian population is unaware of climatic change. It, however, added that 80% of the remaining 35% perceive it as a serious threat.
The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) coordinated with MHRD to formulate a curriculum to include climatic change as part of formal education. However, there seems to be very little coordination between the different ministries and thus it’s values dissolved.
What explains the education sector’s lukewarm standards on climatic change? Here are a few reasons:
- The education community lacks a radical vision for education: Our education system boasts of neoliberal, capitalist, patriarchal values of the modern western education system. Such a system posits learners as separate from the non-human world and positions the content that they learn enabling them to control and exploit the world. We see the global education emphasis on terms such as a child’s inability to read and understand the mathematics that affects their ability to be successful adults with a good job. Rarely we come across topics such as carrying capacity, human dignity, or to engage planetary thinking.
- The education community doesn’t allow what it can’t measure: In 2016 UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report — dedicated to the thematic area of “education for people and planet,” — helped to usher the education sector into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) era, but very little has been done since. Due to conceptual and political challenges, there hasn’t been much data generated to support the claims thus education on such topics has taken a step back.
There is always a lag between new knowledge and discussion of that knowledge in the classroom. Unlike other static and theoretical data, climatic change is dynamic and ever-changing. However, the development in climatic change education can be three dimensional in terms of awareness, capacity building, and innovation.
For the masses, awareness fills the gap. The Science Express Climate Action Special, an innovative mobile science exhibition traveling thousands of kilometers to create awareness has taken shape under the guidance of the department of science and technology.
The Climate Change Research Institute, through it’s research in the energy sector, are working on capacity building among the youth in schools (K12) and colleges. This needs to be expanded further.
The third dimension is to mitigate climatic change education through science, technology, and innovation. Problem-solving innovations in developing clean alternatives, in improving farming techniques, in managing water resources and others are possible by providing technical knowledge mainstream in formal education.
To conclude, climatic change education is still at a nascent stage and as perceived by UNESCO study, India needs strong policies to cohere sustainable development and environmental education.
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