Education and Climate
USAID works to foster climate-resilient education systems and climate-resilient learners.
Children and youth’s learning has declined in recent years, producing a global learning crisis exacerbated by pandemic-driven school closures. Climate change threatens education outcomes similarly, affecting learners across the education continuum. To maintain and strengthen learning and global education outcomes, resilient education systems, from the pre-primary level through higher education, must help learners and the broader education community address, recover from, and overcome climate shocks and stressors.
Climate-resilient education systems and learners
Climate-resilience is the ability to adapt or cope to climate change. It plays a key role in reducing the disruption to local education systems. Resilient education systems can better deliver improved outcomes for learners and contribute to a country’s ability to adapt to climate-induced changes.
Education’s contributions to climate action
Designing climate-resilient education programming
To achieve climate-resilient education systems and climate-resilient learners, climate considerations should be more systematically integrated into activity design, monitoring, and evaluation. These considerations include: understanding how climate change affects education locally, exploring context-specific opportunities and innovative programmatic interventions, and measuring and learning to build evidence of effective practice.
Seven steps to climate-resilient education programming
To learn more about designing climate-resilient programming, click on the resources below:
Advancing Climate-Resilient Education Technical Guidance
Mapping Education and Climate Change Indicators
Education and Climate Change Resources
- Measuring Positive Youth Development Toolkit: A Guide for Implementers of Youth Programs. YouthPower Learning, Making Cents International
- Transforming Systems in Times of Adversity: Education and Resilience White Paper
- Climate-Relevant Programming Inventory Analysis
- USAID’s Climate Change Standard Indicator Handbook
- USAID’s Climate Risk Screening and Management Tool for Strategy Design and Education, Social Services, and Marginalized Populations Annex
- USAID’s Gender Analysis for the Climate Strategy
- USAID’s Country and Regional Climate Risk Profiles
- USAID's Rapid Education and Risk Analysis (RERA) Toolkit
- USAID's Results framework for education programs with a resilience focus
- USAID’s Technical Note: The 5Rs Framework in the Program Cycle