Critically assessing and framing the role of climate education in the CARICOM Caribbean

• In Event: Adapting Education and Teachers in the Face of the Environmental and Climate Crises

Proposal

Critically assessing and framing the role of climate education in the CARICOM Caribbean

This presentation will critically assess and frame the values of climate education in the Caribbean and how they should shape policy and practice in the region. This objective takes place in a context where education has emerged globally in various development and climate change discourses as one of the key and, potentially, most effective and efficient systems of socialization that can impact people’s attitude and behavior towards the environment. Notably, UNESCO (2023) claims that climate change education “is a critical tool to help citizens understand and address the impacts of climate change” (p.1). Thus, recent global development benchmarks have promoted education as a central tool in the fight against climate change. For example, the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number 4, “Ensure Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education…,” target #4.7 “Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship,” requires “that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles…” (United Nations, 2024, p. 4). Education was also prominent at the Conference of the Parties 28 (COP28). For example, UNESCO’s The Greening Education Partnership organized the “first historical Greening Education Hub, featuring over 200 sessions … to promote concrete actions and solutions through education” (UNESCO, p. 1).

Particularly relevant to the Caribbean is the view that education can support/facilitate lower-cost, more efficient and effective approaches to help address climate change by focusing on changing human behavior towards the environment in a region that has significant poverty and historical injustices, from slavery and colonialism to the negative effects of contemporary neoliberal globalization (Brissett, 2022). CARICOM emphasizes that the region is “prone to increased incidence of severe weather, coastal zone erosion, effects of flora, fauna and agriculture and other concerns” (CARICOM, 2014, p. 26). Being heavily tourism dependent, the Caribbean is “both the most tourist-intensive region in the world and set to become the most at-risk tourist destination between 2025 and 2050” (UNESCO, 2016, p. 158). The International Monetary Fund (IMF) (2013) notes that most CARICOM countries have at least a 10% chance of being struck by a hurricane each year and the probability is even as high as 24% in Jamaica and 20% in the Bahamas, and even moderate storms can reduce economic growth by about 0.5% of GDP in a region with some of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. The exacerbation of already stark socio-economic conditions by environmental precarity has further complicated other serious social challenges, such as high debt-to-GDP ratio, high unemployment, especially among youth, high levels of crime, persistent poverty and inequality (Alleyne et al., 2021; CARICOM, 2018; Agozino et al., 2009; Sutton & Ruprah, 2017). These socio-economic problems are burdensome to regional government budgets, squeezing their ability to utilize costly climate mitigation and adaptation measures that the IMF estimates to be about a third of the region’s annual economic output (IMF, 2023). Thus, the prospect of education as an effective, efficient and comparatively low-cost approach to helping address climate change effects is critically important to understand and pursue.

However, a larger question that must be critically examined is what should be the guiding values of climate education in the Caribbean and how should they shape policy and practice? This presentation seeks to engage these core questions.

Theoretical framework
This paper-presentation will be guided by Critical Climate Education (CCE), which “offers knowledge and skills that people must have in order to meet the climate crisis with responsible action” (Svarstad, 2021, p. 215). Drawing from principles of Freirean critical pedagogy, CCE is rooted in climate justice and seeks to develop the type of environmental knowledge that is context-specific, locally and globally focused, anti-oppressive, and action-oriented. Further, CCE “also offer[s] insight into reasons why some climate mitigation [and adaptation] alternatives have been embraced instead of options that could provide more climate justice in time and space” (Svarstad, 2021, p. 214). The study will also be framed by Critical Education Policy Studies (CEPS), which strive to “constantly seek for the harmonious and balanced relationship in the changing world between the components within the education system and between education and society through education policies and education reforms” (Fan & Popkewitz, 2020, p. xii). This is a view that education ought to have a symbiotic relationship with society and should be reformed at different times to respond to critical societal needs, particularly guided by justice. In both CCE and CEPS, justice is a foundational feature, which is especially relevant to the Caribbean with historical injustices, from slavery and colonialism to the negative effects of contemporary neoliberal globalization (Brissett, 2022).

Analysis, Discussion, and Aspirations
The paper presentation will develop a framework for climate education that will:
1. Reframe the logic of education reform
2. Construct a critical education pedagogy
3. Produce integrative education

The presentation will close by discussing the aspirational results of this framework for climate education:


1. A sense of justice that connects people and environment. This symbiotic connection has implications for issues of distribution of wealth and poverty reduction, management of crime, stewardship of nature and land by its inhabitants, and equity based on various social and identity markers. These characteristics combine with but are also dependent on the following:
2. Reduction in individualism, a system fomented under colonialism and further valorized by neo- liberal capitalist globalization. Here, I emphasize the development of a greater sense of social responsibility that transcends individualistic social mobility. This has significant implications for how Caribbean people understand their responsibility to society, as well as how they view the purpose of the environment and their normative relationship between each other and with the environment.
3. Redefinition of the sense of the “good life” away from crass capitalist modernity’s materialism and consumerism that push the limits of the Earth and distort notions of what constitutes human self-worth.

Author

• Nigel Brissett, Clark University