Engaging with climate change-A solid syllabus can enable children to hold governments to account on sustainability

• Thousands of schoolchildren demonstrated on the streets of Australian cities at the end of November, were protesting against their government’s lacklustre response to climate change.
• Their protest march coincided with the G20 summit in Argentina.
• The summit showed no consensus on climate change, proving the point the children in Australia had made — that political leaders are not serious about the environmental crisis.

          Official reaction

• Over the recent years, Australia has experienced dire consequences of global warming.
• By dropping their school routine on a working day, the children were conveying the feeling that natural catastrophe would make academic attainment meaningless.
• Their collective anger was neither politically engineered nor unruly.
• An important thing about the protests in Australia is that many parents and teachers had given their consent.
• The deeper inspiration had come from similar plans reported from Swedish schools.
• Like children in various other parts of the world, Swedish and Australian children have been studying environment science in their regular curriculum.
• It specifically refers to the dangers of global warming and the impending disasters associated with climate change.
• But in addition to the curriculum, direct experience of endemic forest fires impelled adolescent minds in Australia to mount public protests.

          Concept formation

• Why people think that climate change is a myth is easy to explain.
• A basic lesson in geography in elementary schools across the world concerns the distinction between ‘climate’ and ‘weather’.
• The two concepts are typically explained as being different in terms of changeability.
• Weather changes from day to day and season to season, according to standard geography texts.
• Climate, on the other hand, refers to a permanent frame within we study change in weather conditions.
• So, the term ‘climate’ is used for classifying the world and each country in zones.
• It is intellectually challenging for many people to reconcile this notion of climate with the idea of climate change that the UN is using to warn people against terrible environmental disasters.
• Another idea that the UN is doing its best to promote is that of ‘sustainable development’.
• Policy documents include environmental concerns, but prioritise economic growth.
• In the context of globalisation, most countries propagate competitive nationalism.
• These messages are hardly unique to Asian countries.
• Those who espouse environmental causes are often seen as romantics while people who support fast economic growth based on rapid industrialisation are perceived as practical realists.
• A new UN report, released just when the G20 summit was starting, says that the window of opportunity for taking meaningful steps to avert climate change will close within a decade or so.

The Hindu