The Imperative of Climate Change Education for Every Child

On February 20th, 2023 I was asked to deliver opening remarks to a group of 500 NYC public school teachers who attended the first ever Winter Climate Institute, hosted at Teachers College. Below is an excerpt:

My research over the last seven years has focused on education policy as it relates to sustainability and climate change. I am a policy analyst at TC’s Center for Sustainable Futures and have been a part of this initiative since 2017. In my dissertation, I studied the sustainability policy of the NYC Public Schools and had the distinct pleasure of working with Meredith McDermott and Thad Copeland from the Office of Energy and Sustainability and many of the partners, both at the city level and the community level, that support the public schools in tackling climate change and sustainability.

In December last year, I had the privilege to be a Columbia University Delegate in Dubai at

COP28, the 28 th annual climate summit hosted by the UN. At the opening ceremony, Jim Skea,the head of the IPCC, the intergovernmental panel of climate scientists, said the following:

“Our planet has warmed by more than one degree Celsius since the pre-industrial era as the result of burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and unsustainable use of resources. Human activity has led to changes in the earth’s climate of a magnitude that are unprecedented over centuries and thousands of years. Climate impacts, some of them irreversible, are widespread, rapid, and intensifying from the poles to the tropics and from the mountains to the oceans… We are headed towards global warming of 3 degree Celsius if we carry on with our current policies…”

Jim ended his speech with the following sentence: “But science alone is not action”

This is where all of you come in. Because climate education empowers people with the

knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes needed to act as agents of change. More so, in public opinion polls conducted by the TC Center for Sustainable Futures and The Public Matters, the vast majority of American adults say that it is important that elementary and secondary school students learn about climate change. But another takeaway from COP28 for me was that – no matter how important the commitments among nations to tackling climate change and the ratification and implementation of policies and budgets at national and subnational levels, this all plays out at the local level.

The efforts of NYC mayors to infuse the city with sustainable practices, climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts have also included the NYC public schools. With sustainability coordinators in place in every school, and more recently four climate action days per year in every school, the city is trying to move the needle regardless of the federal context or even the global success or failures of negotiations at global climate summits. And a lot of it happens or needs to happen in schools and in the classroom. It is all on you again.

For decades now, the environmental and climate movement relies on partners and most

importantly non-profit organizations that dedicate their time to creating place-based and

relevant curricula and materials that can be used in the classroom. I recently asked the director of such organization how we can ramp up support for the teachers in the classrooms. Her answer was sobering. “We can’t”, she said. “We don’t have the relationship with the students nor the context and focus of every school and classroom.” She said: “We are like ships passing in the night. We pass on all the resources we prepare and say: Here you go, we hope it goes well”. Her message was clear: We rely on the teachers to bring climate change into the classroom and adapt it to the students and the context.

We, at Teachers College, are proud to have a partnership with the NYC Public Schools’ Office of Energy and Sustainability. This research practice partnership is about 10 years old and has evolved from support from TC in data analysis around environmental and sustainability programs in the schools to a close collaboration that generates new research to inform the DOE’s policy and programming. We will support every effort to bring climate change education to every single child. The college is grounded in the values of rigorous training to provide equitable opportunities for all students and use education to address society’s most pressing challenges. We will continue to work on resources for teachers, research to inform all stakeholders in education, and point out gaps in policies, knowledge, skills, and equity in climate education.

Thank you so much for investing in professional development around such an important challenge. Thank you for being and for shaping agents of change. Climate action cannot wait. Let us know how we can help.