Climate on the line
Tushita Rawat
India saw extreme weather events on 88% of the days in the first nine months of the year – from heat and cold waves, cyclones, lightning to heavy rain, floods, and landslides. In 2022, the country recorded its warmest March and third warmest April in over a century. The last decade (2012-2021) was the warmest ever. The rate at which oceans are globally warming has doubled from the 1960s to the 2010s. All of these and much more that is happening around us are telltale signs of the biggest environmental catastrophe staring us in the face – climate crisis.
While the modern world may have ‘flourished’ ever since the Industrial Revolution, greenhouse gas emissions have caused the Earth to heat up by 1.1°C from the pre-industrial levels. The impacts of our planet heating up – extreme weather events and slow-onset processes – have given us a scenario that we now call the ‘new normal’.
Climate change is an irrefutable truth of the present. Its impacts are being experienced RIGHT NOW – more so by the marginalized and underprivileged communities. In such a climate-risked world, as teachers, there is an urgent need now more than ever for:
• Understanding climate change: building up understanding and knowledge of climate change, its science, politics, and impacts.
• Climate change education: facilitating discourses on climate change inside and outside the classroom within the local contexts of the students.
Understanding the science and politics of climate change
The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes one thing categorically clear:
“It is indisputable that human activities are causing climate change, making extreme climate events including heat waves, heavy rainfall, and droughts more frequent and severe.”
“The evidence for human influence on recent climate change has strengthened progressively from the IPCC second assessment report [in 1995] to the AR5 [in 2013-14] and is even stronger in this assessment, including for regional scales and for extremes.”
Barring the natural changes to the Earth’s climate, almost all the warming in the 1.1°C increase can be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions from human activities – extraction and burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, food production and cattle rearing – to name a few. Let us try to understand some important aspects related to human-induced climate change:
Extreme events and slow-onset processes
Extreme weather events or rapid-onset events and slow-onset processes are both impacts of climate change and result in massive loss and damage. The 1.1°C increase, as miniscule as it may appear, has caused our weather to become more extreme and unpredictable. While the world experiences one or the other extreme weather event every day, slow onset processes often go unnoticed. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) specifies eight types of slow onset processes: increasing temperature, desertification, loss of biodiversity, land and forest degradation, glacial retreat, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and salinization. Unlike the rapid-onset events, slow-onset processes do not have a clear start and end and take place over years and even centuries in some cases.
As noted in a study by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), rapid-onset events, like floods, increased the odds of migrating by 687%. At the same time, slow-onset events like drought, have increased the likelihood by 172%.
Adaptation and mitigation
As per the IPCC, the two terms can be defined as follows:
• Mitigation: “An anthropogenic intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases.”
Replacing fossil fuels with renewables (solar, wind, etc.) and combustion vehicles with electric ones are examples of mitigation since these address the root cause of the problem.
The NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions: refer to the next section) of each country are also ways of mitigating climate change.
• Adaptation: “Adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities.”
Painting roofs with white reflective material to reduce the impacts of heatwaves and building sea walls in disaster-prone coastal areas are examples of adaptation. These are aimed at adapting to climate change that is already taking place.
Both adaptation and mitigation measures are important aspects to combat climate change.
Global negotiations
With the increasing threat of climate change, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) set up the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. It published its First Assessment Report in 1990 which established climate change as real and urged the international community to take action.
As a result of the UN General Assembly negotiations that started in December 1990, the UNFCCC came into force on March 21, 1994. It received ratification by the governments of 50 nations. Currently, the Convention has universal UN member nations.
After its inception, the UNFCCC stressed on the urgency to combat climate change and agreed that the already industrialized countries would take the first action and also pay the developing world to avoid the growth of emissions. The historic responsibility of countries that had been generating emissions for a long, long time was also acknowledged and quick actions were sought from them.
In the history of climate negotiations, the Paris Agreement, which was adopted in 2015, has been an important landmark. Under the agreement, the countries provided their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for how they will limit or reduce emissions. These are voluntary targets that countries take to combat climate change, which are to be updated every five years. India’s updated NDCs include reducing emissions intensity of its GDP by 45% by 2030 (first NDC mentioned the range of 33-35%) from 2005 levels; achieving 50% cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuels by 2030 (increased from 40% in the first NDC). The NDCs also talk about changing lifestyle to tackle climate change.
As of today, about 200 countries meet annually at a United Nations climate conference – known as the Conference of Parties (COP) to find common ground on equitable global regulation of economic activity. They are aided and held accountable by thousands of representatives from civil society, research, and economic interest groups.
The 27th annual climate summit, COP 27* has been organized in the Red Sea town of Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt from November 6 to 18, 2022. It is the first COP to be held in a developing country since COP 22 in Marrakech in 2016. The COP focuses on issues crucial to the developing world such as adaptation, climate finance, and loss and damage.
Climate education in the classroom
A recent research led by Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium, shows that children born in 2020 will live through around seven times as many heatwaves as someone born in 1960. They will also see roughly twice as many droughts and wildfires and three times more crop failures than the generation of their grandparents.
How, then, do we take climate education to a classroom full of students who have never known what a planet that does not witness a disaster every day looks like? How do we tell them what the future holds for them in a way that does not scare them but prepares for the present and future – an education that results in action and not just awareness?
The most important aspect of climate change education is an idea that is missed more often than not – CONNECTION. A subject as amorphous as climate change can only make sense to students if connected with their immediate environment. Why, otherwise, would a sixth-grader living in Maharashtra be concerned about the landslides and cloudbursts in the mountains? How would a student ever know that the landfill fires that break out every now and then are indeed connected to them as well as climate change?
Connections are crucial – connections with everyday practices, connections with what’s happening around us, connections with what the textbooks are teaching us, and most importantly, connections with students’ actions.
In order to do this and help students realize just how real climate change is, the topics being taught in and outside the classroom can be connected to the following issues that are part of the curriculum across grades:
It is extremely crucial to constantly update ourselves with whatever is new on the climate plate and to take the knowledge to students impactfully that results in action. Love for nature is at the heart of this education, so leading with solutions and not just problems will help spark a hope in students.
At the end of the day, they must realize that environment is not the problem, our flawed practices are.
| Mean days of rainbows are expected to go up globally by 4 to 4.9% in a year by 2100. By the next century, parts of the world may see a lot more rainbows, including some African countries and India as climate change is impacting precipitation patterns. |
*COP1 to COP25 – Find all the information & News about COP From COP1-COP25 (downtoearth.org.in)
The author is the programme manager of the Environment Education Unit at Centre for Science and Environment. She has been in the education sector for close to a decade now and extensively works with teachers and students in a variety of settings. She can be reached at tushita.rawat@cseindia.org.
