Attachments
SUMMARY
Education can be the key to ending poverty in a livable planet, but governments must act now to protect it. Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as cyclones, floods, droughts, heatwaves and wildfires. These extreme weather events are in turn disrupting schooling; precipitating learning losses, dropouts, and long-term impacts. Even if the most drastic climate mitigation strategies were implemented, extreme weather events will continue to have detrimental impacts on education outcomes.
Climate change is causing massive school closures. A 10-year-old in 2024 will experience twice as many wildfires and tropical cyclones, three times more river floods, four times more crop failures, and five times more droughts over her lifetime in a 3°C global warming pathway than a 10-year-old in 1970. Over the past 20 years, schools were closed in around 75 percent or more of the extreme weather events that impacted 5 million people or more. These closures were often prolonged due to infrastructure vulnerability and the use of school infrastructure for emergency sheltering. Rigorous evidence from COVID-19 shows that, on average, a day of school closures is a day of learning lost.
At the same time, rising temperatures are also inhibiting learning. A school day under extreme heat is a day in which some learning is lost. While the size of the impact remains uncertain and highly context specific, temperatures that are very high or deviate significantly from local trends do precipitate learning losses. Heat-related learning losses may appear unremarkable when looking at changes in average temperatures over time. However, detailed new analysis shows that even the small learning impacts of slowly increasing temperatures could amount to significant cumulative losses over time, especially for those in hotter regions.(3) Students in the hottest 10 percent of Brazilian municipalities, lost about 1 percent of learning per year due to increasing heat exposure. This would mean that an average student would lose between 0.66-1.5 years of learning due to rising temperatures. Together these effects will lead to significant learning losses which will turn into significant income losses, lower productivity, greater inequality, and possibly greater social unrest.
Despite these catastrophic consequences, education remains overlooked in the climate policy agenda. Education made up less than 1.3 percent of climate-related official development assistance in 2020 and mentioned in less than 1 in 3 Nationally Determined Contribution plans. This paper lays out four concrete ways in which governments can protect education systems from climate change so that their positive impacts on economic development, poverty alleviation, and social cohesion can be sustained and boosted. These are: (i) education management for resilience; (ii) school infrastructure for resilience; (iii) ensuring learning continuity in the face of climate shocks; and (iv) leveraging students and teachers as change agents. The paper presents an actionable agenda for each of these with operational examples in different contexts.
(3) Schady et al., forthcoming