What Systems Level Changes does the Climate Crisis Require and How can Education Help?

• In Event: Education in the Climate Crisis: Perspectives from Science, Students, Teachers, and Policy

Proposal

How can we articulate and map the range of systemic shifts necessary to avert dire climate calamity in the next 10-20 years as a guide to global strategic action? How can campaign and program leaders leading climate justice and climate solutions in education do what needs to be done, in what priority order, and understand how their contributions add up to sufficient leverage to shift the system? This paper will build on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, the Project Drawdown compendium of the 100 ways to slow global warming and other summations of the climate crisis science facts and proposed solutions to outline the roadmap of work that must be done to bend the curve of the current climate crisis.
It will align these real world proposals with several system-thinking models to articulate a working map of actions we need to undertake across the education ecosystem to support broader transformations. It will also provide a guiding framework for policy makers and education leaders to consider the multiple ways education can be transformed to support and sustain the inter-generational effort these shifts will require. This framework is rooted in the idea that we will need a breadth of “green skills” to catalyze systems change, and that education ecosystems will need to deliver the specific technical skills required for just transitions, the generic capacities required for all members of society to be “climate-conscious,” and the transformative capacities needed to transform underlying structures of inequality and extraction that have led not only to our present climate crisis but also to its inequitable impacts felt by the most vulnerable communities around the world. The paper will conclude with a discussion on how education leaders can implement this framework in practice.

Authors

• Michael Gibbons, American University

• Christina Ting Kwauk, Kwauk and Associates

• Frank Adamson, California State University, Sacramento