Climate change is a key cause of increased heat waves, flooding, droughts, intense tropical cyclones, rising sea levels, and loss of biodiversity. These hazards increase vulnerability to disasters and result in widespread human, material, economic, and environmental losses, including to education systems.

Despite being threatened by climate change, the education sector offers an untapped opportunity to reduce disaster risk and combat climate change. There is a clear education agenda in adopting strategies to deal with global warming. Such strategies include learning new knowledge and skills, and changing behaviors to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through sustainable consumption patterns in lifestyles, livelihoods, economies, and social structures.

Education is also a critical component of adaptive capacity: how people are educated and the content of education provide the knowledge and skills needed to make informed decisions on how to adapt individual lives, as well as ecological, social, and economic systems in a changing environment.

→ Learn more: Combating Climate Change through Quality Education (Allison Anderson, Brookings Institution, September 2010)

Global experience shows that investments in climate change education, including disaster risk reduction, can change human perceptions and patterns of behavior that reduce the risks and costs of disasters. For example, safe school sites can be selected through participatory risk assessments, ensuring schools are climate-proofed and multi-hazard resilient. Schools can implement school disaster management involving students, teachers and community members in practicing early warning, simulation drills, and evacuation for expected and recurring disasters. At an individual level, climate change teaching integrates not only disaster risk reduction and preparedness but also climate literacy, environmental stewardship, education for sustainable lifestyles and consumption, and green technical and vocational education.

→ Learn more: Let Our Children Teach Us! A Review of the Role of Education and Knowledge in Disaster Risk Reduction (Prepared by Ben Wisner, July 2006)

For instance, in Santa Paz, the Philippines, students learned not only about the causes and consequences of landslides facing their communities but also about risk assessments, including a 2006 study that found the Santa Paz National High school was smack in a landslide prone area. Despite opposition from some sections of their community, students successfully educated and persuaded people to move the school to safer ground. Students have also been effective risk communicators and catalysts for behavior change among parents and other community members outside the classroom. Again in the Philippines, after learning that mangroves protect coastal areas from storm surge and offset the impacts of climate change, and yet were being cut down for charcoal, students led a community effort to safeguard the mangroves in order to protect their coastal community from disasters. They educated others and successfully led an effort to replant 100,000 mangroves in 7 months.

→ Learn more: Building resilience through participation Lessons from Plan International

Recent studies by the World Bank and Center for Global Development affirm the critical role of education in adapting to climate change, stating that educating girls and women is one of the best and most cost effective ways of ensuring that communities are better able to adapt and thus less vulnerable to extreme weather events and climate change.

→ Learn more: Adaptation to Climate Extremes in Developing Countries The Role of Education (The World Bank Development Research Group Environment and Energy Team, June 2010) and The Cost to Developing Countries of Adapting to Climate Change (Consultation draft, The World Bank, 2010)

However, much more must be done globally and nationally through education to reduce disaster risk before it strikes and to adapt to climate change. The international community has an opportunity to raise this issue at the First International Gateway to Africa Conference, which opens today in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference will in part focus on achieving an educated and green Africa and includes a session on greening the environment that will host former Vice President, USA, Mr. Al Gore and Dr. Wangari Maathai, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and founder of The Green Belt Movement. An agenda forged at this meeting that prioritizes climate change education is one that will not only empower citizens to tackle future challenges, including disaster risk, but it will also ultimately empower citizens to achieve climate-resilient sustainable development.