Think & Act Local & Global
September 11, 2017
Beneath the green roof of the Vancouver Convention Centre, with its 400,000 indigenous plants and four beehives, and against a backdrop of wildfires in the West and massive storms and flooding around the world, environmental educators from around the world are gathering for the World Environmental Education Congress this week, with one topic looming large: climate change.
Having been immersed in environmental education myself for decades and climate change-related education, communication and outreach since 2001, I would like to offer a few observations and one thought experiment for the consideration of anyone sharing my concern about the fate of people and the planet.
First, environmental and climate education must be fully integrated. While their domains are not necessarily identical, their overlap is massive. While the environmental education community itself is broad, including Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), experiential outdoor education, and Education for Sustainable Environment (ESE), science-focused climate change education has sometimes been regarded as as a minor and troublesome subset of broader environmental goals and strategies.
One failed environmental education effort in the United States — the No Child Left Inside Act — deliberately avoided any mention of climate change since the topic was regarded as too controversial and a distraction from the main goal of getting students out of the classroom and into the natural world.
Second, like all environmental education, climate literacy and sustainable practices should be based on solid science, infused throughout the curriculum and linked to action. The science component should include essential but sometimes non-intuitive concepts, such as an understanding of how the natural greenhouse effect works. Once informed of the basics, most learners immediately want to know what they can do to make a difference. In our study of US science teachers published in the journal Science, Climate confusion among US teachers, we found that most teachers do in fact link climate change science to actions to reduce climate impacts.
But a third of teachers surveyed give mixed signals about the scientific consensus, and few provide in-depth exploration of this vital topic. Our survey found the mean time spent by a science teacher on the topic of climate change was one to two hours a year. Many high quality online resources available through online libraries like CLEAN, which tie to the Next Generation Science Standards and Environmental Education Benchmarks.
Third, national scale climate information and engagement initiatives, especially education for climate action, must be rapidly and radically scaled up. Warnings about the dangers of human activities on the climate system date to the late 1950s, when television programs and educational materials produced by the National Academy of Sciences first conveyed to the public the potential negative impact of burning fossil fuels. But not until 1992, when the authors of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), was there a clear call for all nations to educate and engage their publics so they could contribute to developing “adequate responses to climate change”.
Unfortunately, these well intended efforts have never been properly funded or prioritized. Currently, only 13% of countries participating in UNFCCC include education as part of their Nationally Determined Contributions, even though the Paris Agreement calls for education to be integral to capacity building.
A 2015 report using Gallup data from around the world published in the journal Nature Climate Change found that 40% of adults around the world, many of them the most vulnerable to climate impacts, are unaware of climate change, lacking even the most basic understanding to be able to adapt to the changing climate. The study concluded: “Improving basic education, climate literacy and public understanding of the local dimensions of climate change are vital for public engagement and support for climate action.”
Fourth, funding for climate education, communication and outreach should be integral to all climate finance. If even one percent of funding going to climate mitigation and adaptation — or disaster relief from climate related events — were allocated for education, communication and outreach, huge and rapid progress could be made toward informed climate action.
And Fifth — Climate and environmental action must be democratized by focusing on local communities. While top-down strategies and policies are in some cases appropriate and important, the original UNFCCC vision to inform and engage the public was the correct strategy.
Finally, a brief thought experiment:
Imagine a structure near where you live that is made out of four modified shipping containers covered by a roof made of solar panels. Known by locals as “the Hive,” the simple structure can provide basic services for the community, including First Aid, or perhaps clean drinking water. But it also serves as an interactive museum or living laboratory where learners of all ages and backgrounds can gain insights into sustainable practices and skills for the 21st century.
Buzzing with activities — people charging their mobile devices and electric bicycles, students learning science and career pathways related to sustainability, farmers and artisans selling their locally produced wares, experts giving workshops on food and healthy lifestyles, information from Project Drawdown, which summarizes the wide range of strategies to reduce climate change impacts, displayed and demonstrated — the Hive is the community hub where individual people can learn about local to global climate action and related Sustainable Development Goals.
Ideal for schools and other learning environments, as well as refugee camps, disaster relief centers and vulnerable communities, the Climate Action Hives are at once adaptable, practical and economical, building capacity on a community scale to minimize climate risks and maximize resilience. They can be rapidly deployed and adapted for local communities. Moreover, if each Hive served roughly 100,000 people and they were strategically deployed around the world, 100,000 would reach the ±10 billion people projected to inhabit the planet by 2050.
Now imagine if these community hubs were already in place….or could be rapidly deployed in vulnerable or impacted communities.
In the end we all, to the best of our abilities, think and act both locally and globally. Robust environmental education that is infused with climate science and solutions, along with engaging demonstrations of existing sustainable practices, can inform and inspire us all toward a safer, more sustainable, survivable future.
Mark S. McCaffrey is author of Climate Smart & Energy Wise (Corwin 2014), a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Development Studies at the National University for Public Service in Hungary and the founder of the UNFCCC Community ECOS (Education, Communication and Outreach Stakeholders).
