public response

ESD and Climate Emergency: Bend the curve for climate change

UNESCO World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development – Pre-conference workshops

Since COVID-19 outbreak, the world’s attention has been focused on the pandemic and the coordination of the emergency response to the crisis. Meanwhile, major sustainable development challenges, including the greatest challenge of our times – climate change – remain unresolved.

Human activities such as burning fossil fuels, cutting down rainforests and farming livestock are responsible for the rise of the earth’s temperature. The only way to counter climate change is to transform our lifestyles and establish sustainable patterns of consumption and production worldwide.

Education has been recognized as a crucial element to counter climate change and is one of the priority areas of Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) because it has the power to transform the way people feel, think and behave. Education contributes to raising awareness on the physical mechanisms and the emergency of climate change and its impacts. Education empowers people to take action by promoting values, problem solving and critical thinking skills.

But, concretely, how can this happen? How can Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) contribute to urgent action for green and sustainable societies in light of the climate emergency?

This workshop will raise the parallels between the pandemic and climate emergency and discuss how the lessons learned from the public response to the Covid-19 crisis can help ‘flatten the curve of climate change,’ in particular through ESD’s contribution. This installment will also address the aforementioned question looking at examples from youth action and from formal education, and will review some recent data.

Register here: https://unesco-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_C482BnaSQVWNpW5f5EYIRQ

Read more: https://en.unesco.org/themes/education-sustainable-development/ESDfor2030-workshops

___________________________________________________________________________________________

CoNGO Notes: For more information on the NGO Committee on Financing for Development, please visit ngosonffd.org. For more information on the NGO Committee on Education, Learning, and Literacy, please visit facebook.com/NGOCELLatUN.