COP29 will take place in Azerbaijan in November 2024.
Adapt these ideas to support your teaching in the weeks leading up to and during the conference to engage your students with the negotiations and where they are taking place.
The adaptable resource should let you pick ideas from a range which include climate zones, contour drawing, climate graphs, greenhouse gas emissions, map and graph skills in the context of Azerbaijan and climate justice.
Stakeholders* are currently being asked to submit responses to the ongoing curriculum review in England.
After discussions at various of our special interest groups and committees, the RMetS’ key points are highlighted below. We encourage our members and partner organisations to echo these in their own responses to the consultation.
* Children and young people • Parents and carers • Teachers, lecturers, teaching assistants and the wider education workforce • Senior leaders of schools, multi-academy trusts and colleges • Further and higher education providers • Sector organisations and unions • Arms’ Length Bodies • Expert organisations, voluntary and community organisations and charities • Researchers and education experts • Subject associations • Careers professionals • Awarding organisations • Employers and employer representative bodies • Local authorities • The wider public
All students should leave school with some climate literacy irrespective of their subject and qualification choices
The RMetS climate literacy survey, 2022 demonstrates that a large proportion of school leavers in England don’t remember having been taught about climate change (46%) in their GCSE years. In addition, students are calling for quality climate education, and employers identify a green skills gap in the UK workforce. The World Bank Group’s Education for Climate Action report (2024) stresses the importance of education as an instrument for increasing climate mitigation and adaptation.
UNESCO’s Greening Curriculum Guidance (2024) concludes “The world faces interconnected challenges, with the climate crisis looming as an existential threat. Addressing these challenges requires an education system that not only acknowledges these realities but actively prepares individuals to navigate them and innovate for a more sustainable future.”
Students should leave school with the ability to apply their knowledge, understanding and skills to the real world as it changes and develops as well as their personal situations and careers. Specifically, high quality climate education should allow students to develop climate literacy and green skills which students can apply to green careers and broader climate action in their personal and professional lives.
The curriculum should be flexible enough to adapt as understanding, technology, relevance and situation changes. Specifically, this relates to the state of the climate, climate impacts around the world and current issues relating to climate justice, politics, economics and communication as well as technological solutions to the climate crisis.
Climate education should make students concerned about climate change but hopeful, focussing on solutions and careers as laid out in the DfE Sustainability and Climate Change Education Strategy (2022), UNESCO’s Greening Curriculum Guidance (2024)
Students should be able to synthesise their learning in different topics and subjects. Specifically, students should be able to apply their learning in geography and the sciences to climate change and sustainability contexts and examples in all subjects, and apply their maths, data and statistical skills to climate contexts in all subjects.
Climate change is a multi-disciplinary problem, impacting on all lives and careers, that requires a multidiscipline approach to both solutions and learning. It should therefore not just be taught in self-contained units (or even a separate subject) but should be integrated, where appropriate, throughout the curriculum in all subjects, by making links between learning in different subjects to develop a climate education which is holistic, strengthens and progresses, broadens learning and is not repetitive. Geography, Physics, Chemistry and Biology are the subjects where core understanding can be developed, which can be the expected knowledge on which application of that knowledge in all other subjects can be based, where appropriate. Maths, data and statistical skills underpin high quality climate education.
Climate education in the curriculum report and Easy Wins for Climate change education in England
Teacher support and subject specific professional development is critical to develop both subject knowledge and subject pedagogy amongst the current and future teaching community. All teachers should be able to access training to improve their climate literacy as well as their understanding of how to appropriately deliver climate education in their teaching.
Many teachers don’t currently have the confidence to deliver climate education UCL survey of teachers in England
The RMetS quality control work with resource providers, publishers and exam boards has revealed widespread misconceptions and out of date materials in use.
© 2024 Royal Meteorological Society
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