Making climate learning mainstream for kids

Each summer, climate educator Nikhil Sharma's classroom in a school in Ahmedabad would be vacant. "It was the intolerable heat that drove the children away from classrooms," recalls Sharma who taught science and social science at the school as a Teach For India fellow in 2018. He especially remembered one girl, Zainab, who had not reported to school for days. Alarmed, he went to her small tenement in a makeshift camp. He noticed that she had the whole body and face covered with heat rashes. "She got sick due to the heat wave. Her picture somehow lingered in my mind," he remembered.

Years on, heat continues to exclude children such as Zainab from the schoolroom. Climate effects, especially extreme weather conditions in 2024 interfered with the education of 250 million children across 85 nations. Ironically, it is such schooling in school which contributes significantly to equipping children for the coming years of a world that is warming.

Emphasizing the importance of climate education to better prepare the vulnerable children and the future generation, UNICEF's Executive Director Catherine Russell, refers in a UNICEF analysis, "Education is one of the services most often disrupted by climate hazards. But it is too often neglected in policy debates, even though it helps prepare children for climate adaptation."

This shortfall has provided opportunities for climate educators and civil societies to re-conceptualize climate education and provide it as experiential activities for the students.

Global warming or climate change is no kids' concept; even the adults sometimes struggle to grasp it, observes Sharma, founder now of Ahmedabad's ElemenTree Education Foundation. Having seen the impact of heat waves on the children and their school attendance, he changed his way of teaching about the environment and worked upon how to discuss climate in terms the children could identify.

"We understood that our approach had to be local and in local languages. Government or school big words like sequestration or mitigation don't resonate. But when we relate climate to their world — discussing the Sabarmati river rather than polar bears, or street heat waves rather than far-away floods — it evokes meaningful conversations. The children participate intensely because it becomes tangible to them," Sharma states.

The climate education situation

In a 2022 report, the updated and rewritten Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) of 166 nations were analyzed, with the report concluding that most nations were not improving the climate education system as part of their national climate plan. The inaction is mainly due to the limited climate finance instruments available in education.

India is one of the handful of nations in the world that has added environmental education officially into the school system following the Supreme Court instruction in 1991. The subject was officially included in primary schooling by the NCERT in the National Curriculum Framework of 2005. Further, India's National Action Plan on Climate Change (2008) fails to make education a central area of attention, while the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, despite being supportive of learning for the environment, is lacking in addressing climate threats to the education sector.

The NEP 2020 focuses on learning through experiences, building community interactions, and studying climate change from various angles, such as waste management, biodiversity, pollution, etc. But equipping teachers with training and capability building to implement the subject in their curriculum, hasn't been given high priority, opine experts.

Consequently, the pace of incorporating environmental education into the mainstream has been slow, although having created a strong 'Eco Schools' programme at the primary level around the implementation of sustainable practices and teacher training. The reach of the programme is claimed to have changed more than 250 schools in India in 18 states and trained about 12,500 teachers. But the numbers pale compared to 2024-25 Economic Survey facts which observe that "India's school education system serves 24.8 crore (2,480 lakhs) students across 14.72 lakh schools with 98 lakh teachers."

While US-based Climate Lit has an open-source library of climate resources and the UK's Carbon Literacy Project offers accredited training and certification to increase climate awareness among individuals and organisations, there is a big role to play and a lot of space for innovation and experimentation in India. And that is what Indian teachers, civil society organisations, and climate activists are starting to do — from ground zero.

Constructing a learning environment with regional orientation

Climate Educators' Network (CEN) was initiated when a group of academics at Azim Premji University saw the lack of appropriate teaching resources on pedagogy for climate. To look up for references in the classroom, they had to draw examples from case studies in the U.S., China or Europe. That gap prompted the vision of initiating an online repository of resources. In their search, they chanced upon TROP ICSU (Trans-disciplinary Research Oriented Pedagogy for Improving Climate Studies and Understanding) — a repository of detailed lesson plans and teaching materials from India and worldwide. TROP ICSU is now CEN's education and training partner. And along the way, they encountered Asar — a social impact advisory — that onboarded as a strategic partner to collaborate on climate action, justice and resilience.

We have green and eco clubs in the schools but no discussion on building systems-level awareness of climate change and adaptation and resilience for children and youth," Pallavi Phatak, Asar Director, Climate and Education, said to Mongabay India.

Also, what we need to do is incorporate climate learning, not make a whole subject of it. Climate has to enter history, geography — into all of it. We're big believers in that method," she says.

During the CEN's inaugural climate summit in January 2025, the group recognised the importance of developing regional centers to introduce local context in climate learning. They have begun creating projects together in Maharashtra, Bengaluru, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. It appears differently across regions, districts, and communities, based on where individuals are situated in society. That's why we are conceiving in regional hubs, rather than centralised solutions.". We must get together as a community to sort this out," emphasizes Sunayana Ganguly, co-founder of the Climate Educators Network. 

For example, the Bengaluru hub is an ecosystem of organisations that are coming together to build a non-formal education program around the priorities described in the Bengaluru Climate Action Plan. In another effort, CEN and Asar are joined by a couple of other organizations such as WRI-India, Children's Movement for Civic Awareness (CMCA), and Thicket Tales in partnering with the city's climate action cell to formulate a non-formal, activity-based curriculum that will empower students to interact meaningfully with climate resilience through their schools.

In Maharashtra, CEN has opted to approach the effort from the ground level. The staff of teachers is organizing a "listening activity" with zila parishad schools in districts like Beed and Raigad. The activity is centered on listening to teachers' perceptions of climate change — what they think, what they sense they need to know, and the questions they have regarding teaching action on climate. Phatak further contributes that in West Bengal, the hub has also been interested in synthesizing indigenous knowledge of adaptation and mitigation, while the discussions in Tamil Nadu are still getting underway.

"Tamil Nadu is the country's first state to make an iconic budgetary allocation of ₹ 24 crores for climate literacy. Our plan here is not only to facilitate grassroots-level conversations, but also to make sure this financial outlay isn't wasted," Phatak says.