Educational strategies to achieve global awareness of climate change and its impact

Abstract

Climate change constitutes a global challenge with significant adverse impacts on sustainable and equitable development. A critical step to address this challenge is to increase the awareness of climate change and the understanding of climate science in current and future generations. Education will help increase the knowledge required to identify appropriate mitigation and adaptation actions that could minimize or even reverse the impacts of climate change at global, regional and national levels. The Transdisciplinary Research Oriented Pedagogy for Improving Climate Studies and Understanding (TROP ICSU) project provides educational resources that can be used by teachers to increase the awareness of the causes and effects of climate change among students at high-school and at the undergraduate level. The TROP ICSU project has collated and curated a repository of teaching resources that can be used by educators to teach a topic in a discipline by using examples, case studies and activities related to climate change. The project demonstrates a novel way of integrating climate change education with the existing curriculum. The TROP ICSU digital resources, while being globally relevant, can be easily adapted to local contexts. The use of these teaching aids is a novel form of pedagogy that can create an interactive and engaging learning experience. This methodology will help in the development of critical thinking and reasoning skills among students while, at the same time, enhancing their conceptual understanding of topics in the discipline. This is an incentive built into these modules so that a large number of teachers would use them globally. Detailed lesson plans that can serve as guidelines for teachers at high-school and undergraduate levels have been developed under this project. These have been reviewed and validated by subject experts for scientific correctness and by teachers for ease of use in their teaching.