Greening the curriculum

The unprecedented climate change and environmental degradation crisis dramatically affects us all, including children, their teachers, and education systems worldwide. At the same time, education remains central to addressing the root causes and drivers of the current climate and environmental threats and helping the transition to greener and bluer societies.

To that effect, the repertoire of studies, tools, norms, standards, and guidelines produced by UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education (UNESCO-IBE) proposes a curriculum that prioritizes environmental sustainability, conservation, and eco-literacy as a potent tool to empower learners as agents of change and advocates who can critically and constructively engage to face and address these critical issues for humanity.

OBJECTIVE
The Greening the Curriculum initiative focuses on supporting the implementation of the TES demand to integrate climate education into all aspects of teaching and at least double the number of countries that include climate education in school curricula at the pre-primary, primary, and secondary levels from the current 45%. To achieve this, greening education and curricula must be embedded in a transformative, systemic, holistic, and progressive understanding of the curriculum as early as early childhood education, and UNESCO-IBE will work to:

• Promote transformative teaching, learning, and assessment practices and support creating interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning opportunities for every learner.

• Support curriculum expertise capacity development and advocacy skills to influence global, regional, and national decision-makers, with a dedicated focus on action in countries under pronounced environmental stress.

• Support mainstreaming transversal issues through a series
of related activities, such as:
1) Developing appropriate tools and messages grounded in the IBE’s knowledge base and expertise to inbuild climate change and sustainable development topics in curriculum design, development, and implementation;
2) Facilitate policy and technical dialogue as well as offer technical assistance to lower-income countries so that these transversal issues are fully embedded in national curricula;