Access to climate education is a matter of justice

In his poem The Right to Dream (1995), Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano imagines “how the world will be in 2025”. He dreams of a better future where there is respect for nature, equality and peace.

Unfortunately, 2025 is coming up and we are nowhere near fulfilling Galeano’s dream. In fact, we increasingly find ourselves in a situation where the survival of human civilisation is at stake. This year alone, millions of people worldwide experienced extreme climate events, groundbreaking temperatures, genocide, and deadly exposure to toxic chemicals and pollution leading to mass death, injury, displacement, poverty, and trauma.

While the near future seems bleak, our education systems are nowhere near providing children with the right tools and knowledge to help them understand it.

Schools continue to be battlegrounds for the building of societies, and education can either be utilised to uphold the status quo or to create a just and sustainable future. Across the world, far-right and authoritarian regimes have consistently attacked access to public education, books, race and gender history, and more.

Even in places where this is not happening, education systems are simply inadequate to prepare new generations for living in an era of climate change and taking action on it.

In a world where climate disasters are disrupting access to education, where eco-anxiety is prevalent among youth, and where pollution affects the health of millions of children, we must ensure that young people are equipped to tackle the climate crisis.

The Global Education Monitoring Report at UNESCO and the MECCE Project’s recent global mapping showed that the world scored only 50 percent on a test on how extensively education systems cover climate change in their curricula and syllabi. It also showed that most of the content related to climate change is still only taught in science classes and is not covered across other subject areas.

Attending public schools in Texas, I saw this playing out in practice. I saw how climate change was briefly mentioned and only framed as a future issue that will affect polar bears. The solutions that were brought up didn’t go beyond recycling and reducing one’s carbon footprint.

It wasn’t until I interned for the Young Scholars for Justice (YSJ) programme, launched by the women-led People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources (PODER), that the pieces began to fall into place. The YSJ curriculum centres on environmental justice organising, the history of movements led by people of colour, local Indigenous cultures, and a critical analysis of sociopolitical structures.

Through various lessons, art and poetry workshops, guest speakers, and organising initiatives, I was able to put words to describe the what, why, and how of the inequalities I had experienced and observed around me.

It was also the first time I realised that traditional knowledge is a critical part of climate solutions. The cosmological stories of plants, tree spirits, bodhisattva etc passed down to me from my Hakka and Indigenous Taiwanese ancestors were full of wisdom. The cultural knowledge I had grown up with was valuable outside my home.

In the following years, I became involved with numerous campaigns, from fighting against the petrochemical industry and for access to clean and affordable water, to advocating for a fossil fuel phaseout and cumulative impact policies.

The climate justice education I received from PODER, from my mum’s stories, my community, my radical professors, and from organising allowed me to turn despair into action. I see education as a practice of freedom, as an opportunity to reclaim culture, rewrite history, and reimagine our world.

I believe it is imperative for all school students to have access to comprehensive climate education, one that centres on traditional ecologies, justice, critical consciousness, social-emotional learning, STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics) and action. This is what led me to co-create environmental justice curricula and programming alongside other people of colour.

Even in the face of book bans, attacks on diverse histories and climate science, we have to keep working to ensure communities have access to critical education. This is especially important now, as a new administration which espouses climate denialism will soon take power in the United States.

We must go beyond simple awareness of the climate crisis to understanding its sociopolitical root causes and solutions. This is why I am supporting the call to action being signed by young people and supported by UNESCO for climate education to adapt so that we can all become empowered changemakers.

We owe it to the next generation to provide them with the tools and knowledge needed to tackle the climate crisis and systemic oppression. Only then can we imagine and build a different world – and I sincerely hope that our future generations will continue to dream. Who knows, perhaps in 2055 Galeano’s dream will come true.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.