The right to education is enshrined in article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which calls for free and compulsory elementary education for all. In 1989 the Convention on the Rights of the Child, went even further, stipulating that countries shall make higher education accessible to all.

Protection of this human right to education is vital, as removing it denies people the opportunity to identify and pursue their own paths for a meaningful life. Education expands freedoms that can provide learners with a ladder out of poverty, the ability to defend other rights (such as gender equality and the self-determination of indigenous peoples), and the potential to have a positive impact in their communities.

Currently UNESCO estimates that 265 million children and adolescents around the world don’t have the opportunity to enter or complete school; 617 million children and adolescents can’t read and do basic math; less than 40% of girls in sub-Saharan Africa complete lower secondary school and some four million children and youth refugees are out of school. Limiting access to education creates a huge barrier to greater social and economic justice.

But it also prevents greater environmental justice as well.

When it adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in September 2015, the importance of education was recognised by the international community, through not just Sustainable Development Goal 4 which aims to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’ by 2030, but also through the recognition that education is essential for the success of all 17 of the Sustainable Development Goals. 

The United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report 2020 highlights the importance of education in strengthening resilience to climate change – stating that education ‘may be even more important than income and wealth for reducing vulnerability to natural hazards’ and that education aids economic resilience through ‘a wider set of skills among better educated individuals, which allows them to take up jobs in sectors other than agriculture’. 

Research by Project Drawdown, a non-profit organisation that seeks to help the world reach a point in where levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere start to steadily decline, illustrates the inherent link between access to education and tackling climate change.

In its 2017 New York Times bestseller Drawdown, Educating Girls was as the 6^th most impactful climate solution we have available today, ahead on many high profile innovations in energy and transport, with an estimated potential CO2 equivalent saving of 85.42 gigatons between 2020 and 2050. 

This was largely down to three things education enables: upward mobility and economic growth, active self-determination and management of reproductive health, and greater resilience to face the impacts of climate change. Women who’ve had more years of education can be more effective stewards of food, soil, trees, and water; and have a greater capacity to cope with environmental shocks such as natural disasters and extreme weather events.

Most importantly, the UNDP’s Human Development Report notes that education plays a vital role in ‘expanding agency’. In the Anthropocene, a new geologic era where humans are a dominant force shaping the future of the planet, the impacts of climate change are profoundly unjust.

People living in the world’s richest countries could experience up to 18 fewer days of extreme weather every year within our lifetime because of the climate crisis, while those in the poorest countries face up to 100 extra days of extreme weather. The actions of a single indigenous person in the Amazon, whose stewardship helps protect much of the world’s tropical forest, offsets the equivalent of the carbon emissions of one person in the richest 1 percent of the world. Unless education gives agency to both change social norms and behaviours amongst the privileged, and empower the underprivileged with greater voice, this cycle of environmental injustice will continue and become worse.

The climate crisis and COVID-19 have led to many world leaders talking about a ‘green recovery’ or ‘building back better’; but unless education plays its part in skills development for an inclusive recovery, the new clean economies of the future will only further perpetuate inequality and injustice.