Specially written for Vikalp Sangam

He was one of thousands of migrant workers who had come from Bihar to Delhi to make a living. He worked in a pipeline fittings factory, living in a shared room without a fan or air conditioner. One day in late May 2024, during a searing heat wave in the region, he collapsed from high fever. His co-workers rushed him to hospital. His body temperature was 107 degrees F, nearly 10 degrees above normal. Efforts to save him came too late. He succumbed to heat stroke on 30 May. 

Although many news outlets reported this incident, nowhere is there any mention of his name. He was yet another anonymous victim of a disaster he did not create. During the heat wave, Delhi’s maximum temperature approached 50 degrees Celsius. According to a report by Down to Earth, “These pre-monsoon weather events can no longer be considered anomalies for a year that saw extreme weather occurrences on almost 88% of the 365 days. These events have claimed over 3,000 lives, affected 3.2 million hectares of crops, destroyed more than 235,000 houses, and killed over 9,000 livestock.” Climate scientists at the World Weather Attribution site estimate that global warming made the 2024 heat wave over South Asia some 45 times more likely. 

2024 was the hottest year on record.  Image: NASA

As members of a collective of college and university teachers — Teachers Against the Climate Crisis (TACC) — from all over the country, we are deeply concerned that global warming is accelerating and the climate crisis is moving faster than the response of governments and institutions. In fact, that response is often either insufficient or in the wrong direction. Climate change is also entangled with other major social–environmental problems, from the mass extinction of species to the imbalance in the nitrogen cycle, from the water crisis to increasing social inequality. Six of the world’s ten most polluted cities are in India. What we face is, in fact, a polycrisis, a complex of interrelated crises that are unfolding and accelerating at rates that are hard to fathom. All of this has a profound negative effect at all levels of life, from the economic and social to personal physical and emotional well-being. The various aspects of the polycrisis, including climate change, deforestation, unchecked urbanisation, and pollution have radically altered our world, and with it the way of life of people. 

As educators, we are deeply concerned with the question of how young people in this country are to live productive, meaningful lives, given this dire environmental and indeed existential crisis., Over the last two years, we have engaged in a dialogue with our members as to the role of education and educators in the face of this challenge. Most educational interventions focus on how to fit climate and environmental education into existing frameworks. But those very frameworks have failed us, as scholars of education contend. So, instead, we started with the question: what does the crisis demand we do? This has resulted in a Vision Document for Climate Education — on which this article is based — that we hope will inspire further discussion, debate, implementation, and action. 

Four broad pillars of a meaningful climate education

Our Vision Statement is intended to be a living document, to be revised at regular intervals through engagement within and outside TACC. Below, we summarize its four broad pillars, intended to inform education at the school and college levels. A meaningful climate education:

1. must be holistic and inter/transdisciplinary, integrating multiple relevant disciplines within and beyond the sciences, and transcending disciplines to construct new knowledge.  
2. must foreground justice and critique the current consumerist socio-economic system which is at the root of the climate crisis;
3. must be experiential, action-based, orient students toward meaningful community service and connect the local to the regional and global; and 
4. must be Nature-immersive, building, through direct experience, cognitive and emotional connection to local ecosystems and to Nature at large.

What can students gain from such an education? Our hope is that this approach will engender intellectual curiosity in students, inculcate a questioning mindset that can critique the status quo, and inoculate them against misinformation and disinformation (such as “greenwashing”). Such an education should also enable students to train for new kinds of jobs (for example, in areas such as renewable energy, climate services, and ecological restoration) while building their resilience to extreme weather and other climatic and ecological impacts.

We recommend an education in which students are taught to observe and appreciate the processes and phenomena that apply in their own immediate contexts, and thereby extend their understanding to regional and global scales, so that the connections and ripple effects are apparent. Thus, students can cultivate a “systems understanding” which entails recognizing that the climate crisis does not exist in isolation from our socio-economic system or from other violations of planetary boundaries such as species extinction. The natural and human systems consist of interconnected parts which interact with one another in often non-linear ways. Thus, any attempt at a solution must address the ramifications for the entire system and not just isolated components. For example, instead of seeking to address discrete “problems” (fires, flooding, drought, storms), students should employ an “earth systems” approach – understanding, for example, that forest fires are linked to the water cycle which is linked to deforestation, and so forth. Students should be given a grounding in the basic science of climate change, including physics, chemistry, biology, and Earth system science that integrates these disciplinary perspectives. 

Just as importantly, an ideal climate education would enable students to recognize that our social worlds are themselves systems in which they are embedded, such that a change in any one aspect — the economy, or the political system — leads to cascading effects down the line. For example, changing a mode of production/economy affects society – including students – not just with regard to livelihoods, family structure/size, gender roles, etc., but also at the most personal level, such as ideas of intimacy, identity, body image, self-expression and so on. 

Understanding the interlinkages of systems

We recommend an education where students can appreciate the often complex linkages between these two apparently dissimilar realms: the social and the natural. Our food systems offer a good example of the interlinkages between these. Similarly, the Anthropocene may be seen as a literal, physical manifestation of the deep, vast, and ever-increasing historical inequities between and within nation states. This involves understanding the historical role played by colonialism and early industrialisation, but also the different ways in which social groups were pulled into its ambit based on their social locations (of caste, gender, region). Social location differentially determines the impact that the climate crisis has on one’s life. The ones who suffer the most have contributed the least in creating the problem, and often have important insights and enact resistances that are rarely meaningfully acknowledged. This involves exploring the different dimensions of climate justice. 

A consideration of the interlinked nature of biological–social–economic processes will help students as they engage with communities in their immediate contexts. An exposure to successful people’s movements in other parts of the country/world will also aid in their ability to understand and formulate their own creative responses (for example, the Deccan Development Society’s millet markets, which seeks to address many aspects of the farmers’ crisis in an integrated manner).

Finally, we emphasise the importance of deep connections between the natural and human worlds in this endeavour. While an intellectual understanding of climatic and ecological problems is necessary, it is not in itself sufficient. Unless students develop a kinship with the natural world, they are not going to be moved to act on its (and their own) behalf. So along with the intellectual component, we advocate a pedagogy that is nature-immersive, non-hierarchical, non-competitive, and attuned to overcoming the divisions that obtain both within and outside the classroom. 

Actualising this vision of (climate) education requires also a programmatic and structural change. We make seven recommendations for first steps, many of which focus on teacher training in the pedagogy of inter-transdisciplinarity, systems thinking, equitable classrooms, and Nature-immersive teaching. This naturally requires giving teachers the space and academic freedom to teach, in ways not exclusively focused on finishing syllabi and examinations. Just as students learn best in a non-hierarchical space, teachers too need to be able to question the status quo when necessary. Teachers need adequate resources, high-quality training, and good salaries. Training of school administrators and principals toward this new paradigm is, of course, a prerequisite. To this end, we also recommend funding for high-quality research in climate and environmental education, focused on the Global South. 

We recognise that none of these changes are easy to make in a system that is siloed, hierarchical, removed from the natural world, and where genuine climate knowledge and action are replaced far too often by lip service and empty sloganeering. Government school teachers report the near-daily bombardment of circulars about the climate crisis and the environment that ask children to plant trees and eschew single-use plastic. Rarely is there attention paid to the root causes of these crises, or discussion that challenges the status quo, or actions that might have a real impact. The barriers to change are immense. And yet, how many more victims of climate impacts will we render nameless and invisible before we recognize the urgent need for change in every sphere of life, including education?  The magnitude and speed of the existential crisis we face, viewed especially in the context of India’s high vulnerability, demands of all of us who care about young people, the Earth, and the future, to work for that change as though our lives depend on it — because they do. 

The authors are members of Teachers Against the Climate Crisis (TACC), a non-funded, non-party organization of teachers and researchers located in universities and research institutions primarily based in India.

Contact the author Sonali.