Linking Education and Climate: Education Resources from Climatelinks

Some of today’s programming at COP28 focuses on the relationship between education and climate change. Climate change negatively affects access to education and impacts learners across the education continuum. Extreme weather events and other climate impacts can block access to schools or close them altogether, reduce household incomes and therefore families’ abilities to invest in education, and interrupt attendance when vulnerable populations are forced to migrate. To maintain and strengthen learning and global education outcomes, resilient education systems at all levels must help learners and the broader education community address, recover from, and overcome climate shocks and stressors. To achieve climate-resilient education systems and climate-resilient learners, climate considerations should be more systematically integrated into education, including understanding how climate change affects education locally, exploring context-specific opportunities and innovative programmatic interventions, and measuring and learning to build evidence of effective practice.

In short, increasing the resilience of education systems and infrastructure can reduce climate risks to education outcomes. At the same time, education systems also can help educate individuals and communities on climate adaptation and encourage future climate action. USAID’s Climate Strategy includes increasing the resilience of the education sector by supporting climate-resilient education systems and non-formal education settings to ensure learning continuity and the development of climate adaptation skill sets, especially for underrepresented and vulnerable populations.

Here are some education resources from Climatelinks to help development practitioners better understand the relationship between education and climate change programming. Some of these resources are also available on EducationLinks.

Advancing Climate-Resilient Education Technical Guidance

The Advancing Climate-Resilient Education Technical Guidance builds on the USAID 2022–2030 Climate Strategy and the 2018 USAID Education Policy to support USAID Missions and partners who seek to integrate climate action and awareness into education programs and are committed to achieving climate-resilient education systems and fostering climate-resilient learners. It outlines how to identify opportunities for climate action that respond to known climate hazards through mitigative, adaptive, and transformative actions.

Climate Risk Management Annex for Education, Social Services, and Marginalized Populations

This annex to the Climate Risk Screening and Management Tools is designed to provide USAID Missions and operating units with more information on climate change implications for education, social services, and marginalized populations.

Mapping Education and Climate Change Indicators

For USAID Missions and Operating Units advancing climate action in and through education, both education and climate change standard indicators may be applicable to their Performance Plan and Report (PPR). To facilitate reporting across these priorities, the Center for Education has mapped education and climate change indicators to different programming examples. These examples show how Missions can report the same output across different indicators.