Abstract
We are pleased to present the second of the two part Special Issue that commemorates the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. This issue contains a guest edited special section from UNESCO on Climate Change Education (CCE) which highlights the developments in approaches and provides an overview of the rationale for CCE within the context of ESD. The climate change (CC) discourse, with all of the accompanying media attention, provided environment and sustainability educators with a highly strategic entry point for education and communication. However, despite the media blitz that converted CC into a universally recognizable buzzword, systems thinking is still a challenge and public perceptions regarding the complexity and contestability of climate change continue to prevail despite CCE efforts over the past several years.
While awareness on climate change has increased with increasing scientific evidence, the number of extreme climate based disasters has been going up rapidly. However, the response from the nations of the world is still inadequate. The targets for global warming being discussed as part of the voluntary commitments from different nations, do not yet add up to the 2 degree Celsius limit, widely considered as the upper limit that can still be managed. Among the strategies being considered, education, training and public awareness, highlighted in Article 6 of the UNFCCC is gaining some momentum. There is a move to include this in the main text as nations go towards COP in Paris.
UNFCCC, UNESCO and CEE have jointly embarked on a survey to collect case studies where education has been used for CC mitigation. These case studies might comprise anything as simple and effective as providing feedback on consumption patterns as part of the electricity bill or specific strategies to get more people to use public transport or programmes aimed at policy makers to make them more aware of planning that can prevent an increase in carbon footprints as nations develop. More cases involving best practice need to be identified and documented if ESD and Article 6 are to play a more prominent role in global efforts at CC mitigation and adaptation.
The draft Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs do place more emphasis on ESD. Goal 13 urges nations to ‘take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts’. Emphasizing education, it recommends action to ‘improve education, awareness raising and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction, and early warning’ (United Nations, 2014). As the SDGs get finalized and strategies developed and adapted, ESD should soon become a major contributor to the efforts at CC mitigation and adaptation.
Besides climate change, ESD needs to make strong connections to the several sustainable development goals or SDGs that are being finalized. Each of the SDGs is located in complex areas of policy and practice where education has a critical facilitating role to play.
It is important to emphasize that sustainable development is context-specific and needs educational inputs at every stage, starting with recognizing the need for sustainability, negotiating what sustainability means to the individual and the community, seeking technical information and training to be able to identify and address sustainability issues, monitoring, implementing and continuing to adapt approaches in order to keep them sustainable. While it is widely understood that technical content, capacity building and resources are required, it is not so clear to most that ESD is a different type of education.
Sustainability in the context of development is an intensely agenda-laden concept and as such Education that promotes sustainable development is squarely aimed at change. The techno-scientific approach to environment and sustainability has accommodated the ESD demand for the integration of the principle of systems thinking into content and curriculum at the formal level, at least conceptually. But this alone is not ESD. ESD is concerned with deep change that is aimed at sustaining all life as well as the living and non-living interlinked environment that has a bearing on life. ESD subscribes to a normative goal which involves individual and community wellbeing as defined by all concerned in terms that are inclusive and equitable. Thus ESD is concerned with culture and power which are fundamental to equality of opportunity for all. The change agenda of ESD needs to be transacted in discursive space which is accessible to all and, in order to speak and be heard in this discourse, participants need to be suitably empowered. So ESD needs to identify barriers to public discourse while creating the capacity among all people to contribute to sustainable development.
Although ESD proponents have been prioritizing the teaching of skills, values, capabilities and enabling mechanisms, these primary ESD principles have yet to be successfully integrated into formal educational systems. The Decade of Education for Sustainable Development has seen many examples of best practice all over the world from which appropriate delivery mechanisms can be devised, recommended and scaled up at the global level.
The work of the Earth Charter has foregrounded the role of culture and tradition in its development of broader loyalties and shared goals for all individuals on planet Earth. This has further led to the recognition of global citizenship as a goal for ESD. The critical contribution that the global citizenship approach makes is in providing a uniting and galvanizing principle for ESD by seeking to identify skills, values and approaches that are essential for sustainable development in a conceptual framework that is amenable to implementation across formal and informal educational systems and at all levels. By seeking to re-politicize people along global lines through highlighting skills needed for SD, Global Citizenship Education is capable of bringing the radical change agenda implicit in ESD in a universally acceptable way.
There has been considerable academic work and research on exactly what skills and capabilities ESD must aim to generate. Besides ESD experts, economists and philosophers like Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have also weighed in on the subject of the need for global citizenship education to say that such education must focus on fostering critical thinking, equity, empathy and understanding in order to facilitate sustainable development. It would seem therefore that ESD is about acquiring relevant skills, capabilities, values, humanity—in other words, continuous learning where content is secondary to process.