Environmental Stewardship through Empathy, Equity and Empowerment – Pakistan’s First Curriculum on Climate Change Education (grades 1-10)

• In Event: Virtual Roundtable Session 3
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Roundtable Discussion on Barriers and Potentials in Using Social-Emotional Learning Towards Climate Justice: A View from South Asia

Proposal

In 2025, Pakistan became the world’s most climate-vulnerable country, rising from fifth to first in the Climate Risk Index (Germanwatch Climate Risk Index 2025). Ongoing climate impacts deepen existing social inequities, highlighting Pakistan’s urgent need for cross-sectoral, inclusive, and transformative roadmaps to elevate collective climate consciousness leading to sustainable action.

At the CIES 2026 roundtable, I will introduce Pakistan’s first Climate Change Education Curriculum. Created by the Teachers’ Resource Centre (TRC), a pioneer in education support since 1986, this Curriculum institutionalizes a locally designed model to cultivate environmental stewardship starting from early education through grade 10.

Designed through an immersive stakeholder consultation process and built around five core themes—including Climate Justice and Equity, a topic often missing from mainstream curricula—this model offers contextually relevant, progressive sub-themes that resonate with diverse Pakistani settings: urban, rural, coastal, mountainous, glacial (disparate, poverty stricken, high-risk, underserved, unlettered). Recognizing that meaningful climate education requires more than knowledge transmission, TRC’s Curriculum integrates Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) as a continuous thread. SEL competencies like empathy, collaboration, and responsible action empower students to connect emotionally with climate issues and develop a sense of agency.

TRC’s teacher-centric approach includes a toolkit of 150 ready-to-use lesson plans aligned with the Curriculum,especially designed for educators in marginalized communities and resource-limited schools. The materials emphasize experiential learning and reflect students’ lived realities, encouraging them to become critical thinkers, innovators, and climate justice advocates enabling them in their roles as influencers/advocates for families and communities.

This session will showcase practical and powerful examples of how TRC’s Curriculum nurtures critical thinking, resilience, and stewardship among young learners. We will also discuss challenges and opportunities in embedding empathy-centered SEL into climate curricula through formal and informal education pathways, particularly within Pakistan’s public, low-resource and highly climate vulnerable education contexts.

Central to this conversation is the principle of “positive peace”—pedagogies grounded in empathy for people, place, and the natural world. By rooting climate science in emotional intelligence and locally grounded inquiry, this model offers a transformative education paradigm where environmental literacy, cultural relevance, and social justice converge to prepare youth for meaningful climate action.

As educators, leaders and ALL OF US confront the inequities deepened by climate disruption, placing SEL at the heart of climate literacy provides a pathway to social cohesion, justice, and sustainable resilience—an aspiring approach for cultivating a generation both resilient and compassionate, ready to champion transformative change.

Author

• Ambreena Ahmed, Teachers' Resource Centre