Global concerns surrounding climate change, exacerbated by its detrimental impact on ecosystems and societies, underscore the urgency of climate education. This study emphasizes the differing short-term needs for tackling air and water pollution and mitigating climate change across diverse countries. While developed nations integrate climate education seamlessly, challenges faced by developing and underdeveloped countries include limited resources, technology constraints, and a lack of interest. This chapter advocates for collaborative efforts among stakeholders, policymakers, and educators to ensure universal access to effective climate education, fostering a sense of global citizenship. This collective approach is crucial in addressing shared challenges and empowering individuals to contribute meaningfully to climate change solutions.
Top1. Introduction To Climate Change Education
Higher education leaders often claim that their institutions, through research and teaching, contribute to addressing humanity’s biggest challenges (Gamoran, 2018; Stewart and Valian, 2018). However, in practice, it is not clear to what extent the higher education is playing its part in the transformative changes that any society needs to confront the intersecting calamity of worsening the change in climate, economic injustice growth, and increase in health disparities. In this new era of intersecting and cascading catastrophes, a cumulative polycrisis (Stulz, 2023), new responsibilities, and opportunities are rising for role of the higher education in society (Homer-Dixon and Rockström, 2021). The higher education sector is currently being challenged to innovate and respond to play its part more to global sustainability and climate justice across the globe (Steele and Rickards, 2021; UNESCO 2022), yet as the climate crisis escalates, it becomes more obvious that higher education’s commitment to the climate justice is insufficient (UNESCO, 2022). When the policies of universities and climate action plans focus on technology-based mitigation that, similar to the climate action plans of many other organizations and jurisdictions, fail to consider systemic change and equity, climate injustices are worsen. With the continued concentration of power and wealth among organizations and individuals that are already privileged, the support of public for higher education is being reduced, and the preferences of these institutions are increasingly aligned with the priorities of the powerful and rich rather than focusing on the good for public. Unfortunately, most of the richest organizations and individuals with strong connections with higher education institutions are avoiding, rather than investing in, a transformative response to climate crisis and other intersecting crises (Kenner, 2020; Stephens, 2022). With growing recognition that the climate crisis is an indication of larger socioeconomic and political dysfunction, a climate justice outlook embraces a transformative lens engrossed on financial and social innovation, that is a paradigm move from the more mainstream technocratic method of conceptualizing climate “solutions” (Sultana, 2022).
The crucial need for societal transformation to simultaneously meet worsening health and economic growing climate vulnerabilities and inequities has become more clear since the wealthiest billionaires across the world more than doubled their wealth since the very start of the pandemic (Ahmed et al., 2022). Acknowledging the injustice of these unsustainable swings, higher education has the tendency and opportunity to leverage substantial, physical, intellectual, financial and labor resources to promote transformation and decrease devastating human suffering from climate and economic injustices. Through varied mechanisms, the higher education sector has multiple opportunities to support, explore, and advance this transformative social change towards a more stable and just future. Many universities, however, are not yet flaunting their influence and impact to promote and prioritize social change and innovations for climate justice (Urai et al. 2023a; Steele and Rickards, 2021). Unfortunately, many university practices devalue and discourage social revolutions toward climate justice (Kinol et al., 2023). Moving beyond technocratic methods to climate action and justice articulates a paradigm shift in how organizations think about their response to crisis of climate. Climate justice widens the responsibility to readdress the legacy of exploitation and injustice resulting from systemic policies, practices, and priorities that keep inequities in climate vulnerabilities alive—locally, regionally, and globally (Sultana, 2022; Stephens, 2022).