A quiet transformation is taking place in classrooms worldwide, where climate change is no longer confined to textbooks but brought to life through everyday learning. From Brazil to Cambodia, Indonesia and Rwanda, teachers are leading this shift, turning sustainability into a lived, everyday experience rather than a standalone topic.
These efforts are supported by UNESCO’s programme on Education for Sustainable Development, which supports countries connect climate learning with real-life action.
Through this initiative, teachers are being trained to turn schools into spaces where sustainability is not an add-on but central to everyday learning, embedded across curricula, teaching and school life.
A global effort rooted in classrooms
One of the biggest barriers to climate education is to take an abstract concept such as sustainability and resilience and translate it into something personal and actionable.
In Cambodia, UNESCO has been working with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, as part of the Climate Smart Education Systems Initiative, to help teachers learn to redesign lessons so that climate concepts connect to students’ realities. A history teacher Vuthy began asking students how environmental factors like drought or flowing shaped past societies and then reflect on how similar forces affect their communities today. A math lesson on multiplication became an exercise in calculating how much CO2 a tree can absorb.
In the Wakatobi Island of Indonesia, Lisa, a volunteer educator, found her approach through a UNESCO-supported ocean literacy programme. Rather than opening a textbook, she holds up a poster of local fish species and asks the children which ones they recognize. Hands go up immediately. What follows is a structured lesson built entirely on lived knowledge – which species get caught, change of seasons and why it matters.
“They already know the ocean,” Lisa says. “Sometimes they just don’t realize that what they see and do every day has meaning.”.
In Rwanda, UNESCO and the Greening Education Partnership worked with the Foundation for Environmental Education to support green schools like the GS Murambo school in Mugambazi. Teachers were trained to integrate climate awareness into everyday school life – and the results started in the soil. Students planted and now care for trees on the school grounds, which provide shade in the summer heat and have transformed the physical environment of the school.
“Before we had many problems in the school. For instance, we didn’t have grass. Whenever there is dust in the summer, children struggle to learn. Now we know how to solve existing problems, teach our children good lessons and how to accompany each other. We show them, they see and they learn by watching,” says Rwamarenga Theoneste, head teacher at the primary school of GS Murambo.
read more: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/world-environment-day-how-teachers-are-transforming-climate-education?hub=701
