Financing Resilient Education Systems in a Warming World – The Education Resilience Finance Pact

• In Event: Climate, Education, and Peace: Financing Resilience in a Warming World

Proposal

Education systems are increasingly on the frontlines of the climate crisis. In low- and middle-income countries, climate-exacerbated hazards such as floods, cyclones, droughts, and extreme heat already cause billions in annual losses to school infrastructure and contribute to prolonged learning disruptions. These shocks deepen inequalities, accelerate dropout, especially for girls and marginalised learners, and erode long-term human capital. Yet despite education’s central role in climate resilience and peacebuilding, the sector remains almost absent from global climate finance flows, accounting for just 0.001% of climate finance in 2021/22, and is rarely integrated into disaster risk financing (DRF) arrangements.

The Education Resilience Finance Pact (ERFP) offers a coordinated blueprint to close these gaps. Developed through the author’s scoping study, the Pact commits governments, humanitarian actors, donors, and multilateral finance institutions to: (i) recognise the unique nature of climate and hazard threats to education; (ii) integrate education into climate and DRF mechanisms; (iii) build institutional capacity, data systems, and contingency planning; and (iv) ensure equitable financing for communities both within and outside national systems.

The ERFP is not a single instrument but an approach to aligning financing across the crisis through both sovereign and non-sovereign channels. It draws on lessons from social protection and other sectors to make education systems shock-responsive by embedding pre-arranged finance and operational triggers into sector plans. This integration can unlock faster, more cost-effective responses, protect continuity of learning, and reduce the cascading social risks of school disruption.

Pilot models under the ERFP illustrate diverse entry points:
- Linking existing risk pools to predefined education sector contingency plans, ensuring rapid payouts fund agreed actions such as infrastructure repair, school feeding, and fee waivers.
- Embedding education in climate adaptation plans and attaching education-specific DRF instruments to multilateral development bank loans and grants, complemented by cross-country humanitarian education risk pools.
- Developing costed, phased contingency plans that align emergency, recovery, and reconstruction financing and integrating social protection mechanisms to reduce household-level barriers to education, as well as remote education and child protection.
- Creating facilities for high-frequency, lower-severity events (e.g., recurrent flooding, seasonal heatwaves) that cumulatively undermine attendance and learning but fall below conventional DRF thresholds.

By aligning climate adaptation funds, the Loss and Damage Fund, global education facilities, and humanitarian pooled funds around common planning and trigger frameworks, the ERFP seeks to transform fragmented, ad hoc responses into predictable, coordinated action. This is both a climate justice and peacebuilding imperative: safeguarding education during crises sustains the social fabric, reduces inequality, and strengthens community resilience against the destabilising impacts of climate change.

In sharing the ERFP concept, this presentation will highlight emerging country pilots, operational design choices, and financing innovations, and invite dialogue on how to scale a multi-stakeholder Pact that delivers resilient learning for children in climate-vulnerable regions.

Author

• Emma Gremley, International Rescue Committee (IRC)