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

*Education’s contributions to enhanced adaptive capacity*

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.