Climate Change Literacy – Bashir ud Din
Our education system, its curricula and textbooks need to contextualize the socio-climatic challenges by instilling a sense of moral activism and social responsibility among our youth. The curriculum must hold concepts on climate change awareness, lessons on citizenship, sustainable development, social justice and equity to connect the learners with contextual realities with emerging global challenges. But our education system has not been able to successfully implement climate change education and produce a morally and socially aware generation.
It is conceivably indicative that the education system has failed in mainstreaming climate change awareness and global citizenship education. To mainstream this, it needs more radical engagement with the pedagogical, social-emotional, economic, and moral-ethical challenges of the climate change crisis. Thus, interactive pedagogy and social-emotional stability are essential for climate change literacy. Because learning about climate change would demand identifying something new in pedagogical creed and technological proficiency, an interdisciplinary approach to teaching climate change concepts, adaptation measures and resilience education.
It is a prevalent agreement among academic, political and scientific communities that climate change is now a serious existential threat in Pakistan, while addressing this issue is one of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But there seems to be a gap in the role of education in enabling climate change awareness among the students. Climate change literacy and environmental awareness need to bridge this gap by evidencing the contextual realities of knowledge and the impacts of climate change dimensions on human activities. Schools have to serve as centres for change, giving the highest importance to contextualizing the concepts of climate change education in the curriculum.
For this to happen, more efficiency is needed to develop a framework for integrating climate change concepts. This may further equip teachers and learners with a basic understanding and essential skills to take action for climate change impacts among societies from personal to the global level. Through climate change literacy, awareness can be created for the understanding of climate impacts on human conditions to further enable communities to take action about mitigation and adaptation.
The current climatic challenges in the country and the predictions for the future on this issue highlight that climate change education is to be included in the curriculum. Moreover, an urgent action for climate change literacy is needed for collaborative efforts and practices for responsible environmental stewardship to improve the sustainability of future generations. Value-oriented guidance and socially responsible learning practices may bring a positive social transformation to the existential issue in Pakistan caused by climate change challenges.
The writer is school leader at the Aga Khan Education Service Pakista
Could be reached at: [email protected]
