Supporting Early Childhood Development Practitioners to Integrate Climate Actions into their Programs

• In Event: Climate awareness and action for all ages and stages: findings and recommendations from studies at the intersection of climate change and children and youth

Proposal

The climate and environmental crises are major threats to young children and their families that can affect a child’s rights to thrive, survive and learn. Young children are the most vulnerable of vulnerable groups because climate change and environmental degradation has the greatest impact on children’s growth and development as well as the wellbeing of pregnant women and fetuses. Predictably, young children aged 0-6 are frequently left out of the global climate change discourse and actions and Early Childhood Development (ECD) programs and services such as pre-schools and teachers are disempowered to address the issues of climate change and environmental degradation in their work.

One of the first steps is to support ECD and climate change actors to understand the issue of climate change and environmental degradation on young children. Alongside this there is a need to support the ECD sector to incorporate actions that promote adaptive and climate resilient ECD, supporting the most vulnerable young children and families who face the climate and environmental crisis. In this panel, ARNEC will present a new technical guidance note that aims to support the ECD sector, specifically ECD technical staff in countries across the Asia-pacific region, in making ECD programs more climate sensitive. More specifically it will help ECD technical staff to; 1) increase their understanding of how climate change and other environmental issues affect young children, and 2) build their capacity to integrate climate actions into ECD programs.

The technical guidance note provides ECD technical staff with guiding principles and entry points for designing effective climate change sensitive programming in the early years such as climate change curriculum in pre-schools, early childhood centers and home-based programs.
Failing to address the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation on young children undermines the long-term project of climate adaptation and the larger agenda of sustainable development. This presentation of the guidance note will show how to empower ECD technical staff to incorporate tangible actions that promote robust ECD programs to strengthen adaptive capacities, build resilience and buffer impacts of climate change and environmental degradation.

Author

• Evelyn Santiago, ARNEC