Throughout 2022, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and GPE worked together to identify a new approach needed to address climate and environmental change in and through education. We co-hosted a conference on the topic in June, co-curated a series of blogs, and collaborated to identify opportunities to get education higher up the agenda at COP27.

Just before the year ended, Minister Andrew Mitchell launched FCDO’s new policy Position Paper: “Addressing the climate, environment and biodiversity crises in and through girls’ education”. This paper sets out FCDO’s vision for bringing the relationship between girls’ education and climate and environmental change – two of the UK’s top development priorities – into sharper focus.

FCDO’s new Position Paper:

• Makes the case for joint action
• Provides a new framework for delivering climate-smart education systems
• Sets out what FCDO will do to leverage the education and climate nexus
• Calls for financing, people and partnerships to make progress.

Why do we need this position paper?

Addressing climate and environmental change and delivering girls’ education are essential to poverty reduction and building prosperous, resilient economies and peaceful, stable societies. Too often these issues are viewed in isolation, when in fact they are inextricably linked.

• Last summer alone, devastating floods destroyed or damaged some 26,000 Pakistani schools. At the other extreme, the worst drought in 40 years is having dire consequences for children’s education in the Horn of Africa. Without urgently adapting education systems to extreme weather events and environmental changes, education goals will continue to fall further out of reach and future generations will be less able to survive, let alone thrive, in our changing world. The most marginalized people in the poorest areas are the hardest hit by these issues.
• Without harnessing the power of education, we are unlikely to solve the climate crisis. Quality education is essential for reducing vulnerability, improving communities’ resilience and adaptive capacity, identifying innovations, and for empowering individuals to be part of the solution to climate and environmental change.

If we want to effectively tackle these priority issues, we must better understand how they are linked and find integrated solutions.

What does it say?

FCDO’s Position Paper makes the case for a more integrated approach to these two issues from national governments, bilateral, multilateral, and private donors, and civil society organizations.

To support them, it provides a new framework of priority actions to build school systems that are more resilient to climate and environmental changes, and to build knowledge, skills, and agency for climate action, particularly in low and lower-middle income countries.

FCDO sets out what we will do differently using three levers of financing, people, and partnerships to deliver change. This includes:

• Making FCDO education programs ‘climate-smart’
• Raising the profile of education in climate fora
• Convening a coalition of the willing.

What comes next?

This Position Paper is just one step along the road to building climate-smart education systems and securing a virtuous cycle between education outcomes and climate adaptation and mitigation.

FCDO looks forward to working with GPE and partners over the coming year to continue to raise climate change up the education agenda and vis-versa.

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Read other blogs in this series