THE POWER OF CLIMATE EDUCATION

Authors: Keya Lamba and Shweta Bahri, co-founders of Earth Warriors

Education is the most impactful tool we have to prepare our youngest generations for the single biggest challenge of their lifetime, and it must play a crucial role in the world’s response to climate change.

Earth Warriors is a global social enterprise delivering climate education resources to young children around the world. We founded the business on our belief in the immense potential of climate education to help the next generation understand the climate crisis and take action.

With studies showing that 77% of children today worry about climate change more than anything else, it is clear that action on a global scale must urgently take place. But parents and educators often don’t have the knowledge or resources to educate their children on the subject without exacerbating this anxiety.

Our lessons and resources have been developed by teachers for teachers - we’re the first to provide a comprehensive global curriculum for 3-to-11-year-olds on climate and sustainability issues.

HOW DID THE IDEA COME ABOUT?

We met in 2019, working for sister non-profit organisations in London. We became good friends and often talked about starting something together down the line. We found our working styles were compatible and have always had a lot of respect and empathy for each other, as well as a strong friendship.

We had many conversations about how difficult it is to change adult behaviour, and we’ve seen how easily young children absorb new habits. We talked about how powerful it would be if we could instil environmentally-aware habits and behaviour from a very young age as young people all over the world are desperate to understand the climate crisis.

We did some research and couldn’t believe something like Earth Warriors didn’t already exist - something that combined early childhood education with environmental awareness and activism.

There were a lot of places we found such as WWF, NASA Kids, or National Geographic Kids, that were offering single lesson plans or resources on climate education - for example, a lesson on recycling or greenhouse gases or whatever it might be. But those were all part of a broader environmental curriculum as opposed to a specific climate change curriculum. They also weren’t necessarily a series of lessons that built on themselves week after week, year after year. It wasn’t comprehensive.

We also came across the Stanford School of Earth, which had created a very comprehensive climate change curriculum for middle and high school students (one of their scientists now actually peer reviews Earth Warriors’ curriculum!). But there was really nothing for younger ages, despite it being such a critical time for development.

We’ve seen that climate education resources for teens is a rapidly growing market. However, education resources for younger age groups are lacking. In the UK, schools do not have a unified strategy to educate their students, leaving many children without sufficient knowledge of key climate concepts and issues.

With climate change taking a huge mental health toll on children, and with eco-anx- iety on the rise, we wanted to give children the tools they needed to feel empowered in the fight against climate change.

We won a grant from the Harvard Mittal Institute with the idea for Earth Warriors, and that made us realise other people believed in our idea too. It gave us the push we needed to get started.

HOW DOES THE EARTH WARRIORS PROGRAMME WORK?

When we founded Earth Warriors, we initially designed a curriculum for 3-7 yearolds only. But then we visited some of the schools that were piloting the programme and we spoke to the students. The seven year olds asked us what they were going to do in Earth Warriors next year and said how excited they were to continue learning about the environment - that’s when we realised we had to expand our curriculum to encompass all of the primary school years.

The teacher resources, guides, activities and lesson plans are delivered via our online portal, which also allows teachers and students to connect with other classrooms around the world following the curriculum, including the UK, the US and India. We also organise events and competitions that allow children across the globe to interact with and learn from each other. We know over 90% of teachers want to teach about climate change but the majority don’t feel confident to do so - our resources alleviate this burden.

Our lessons and resources have been developed by teachers for teachers, and can be implemented in schools anywhere in the world and teachers are guided on how to contextualise the activities and resources for their local context. We recently launched the Earth Warriors programme in 20 rural schools in Zambia and Botswana and customised the curriculum to teach the students about the region’s most urgent environmental challenges, including droughts and flooding.

Our curriculum uniquely takes a positive, solutions-focused approach which is key to combating climate anxiety and empowering children to take climate action. We want to generate “Warrior Awareness” among the nursery, primary and prep schools. Teach the teachers - and the school decision-makersthat climate education must be an essential part of their classroom offering.

We’ve received a lot of support so far. We were recognised as a UNESCO green citizens initiative for our innovative approach in 2022, and received funding from National Geographic to create the world’s first animated video for 3-7 year olds teaching them about climate change and sustainability.

We also recently received funding from Theirworld, which is chaired by respected women and children’s rights campaigner Sarah Brown - which allowed us launch the programme in the schools in Zambia and Botswana. This is the first time pupils in these schools will receive a comprehensive climate curriculum - it is also being delivered to Botswana’s Dukwi Refugee Camp, which is home to 3,500 refugees from across Africa.

The Challenges

We started Earth Warriors in 2020, so one of the biggest challenges in launching was that all of the schools were shut down and doing virtual lessons. It made it very difficult to test our curriculum, but we did it! We decided to use that time to continue developing our product. We worked with Harvard and Stanford professors to develop the global learning standards on climate and sustain- ability education for 3-7 year olds, and had our entire curriculum peer reviewed. We spoke to teachers to understand what their barriers were to educating their kids about climate change. In hindsight, that time was so valuable because it only made our curriculum that much stronger.

We’re confident in our base content, we know what we have. But we’ve learned to be very adaptive in how we package that content - we originally developed Earth Warriors as a full year curriculum. Now we’re hearing from some schools and teachers that they want only one term, or a half term, or an after school club. So we’ve learned how to pivot, how to alter what we have to answer our schools’ needs.

The Future For Earth Warriors And Climate Education

We see Earth Warriors as a global brandwe’re already in six countries, have reached over 15,000 students and have trained over 1000 teachers. So, in five years’ time we want to have a strong presence in the UK and India, and a fast-growing network of schools in other countries around the world.

We want to be the go-to platform for climate education for young children. We will always have our school curriculum, that’s our bread and butter. But we want to expand on that - we see teacher training becoming a big part of Earth Warriors’ future. Parents have also been approaching us, asking for books and videos that they can use to explain climate issues to their kids.

Education must play a crucial role in our collective response to climate change – it is the most impactful tool we have to prepare for the single biggest challenge of our lifetime. When people think, ‘climate education for young children’, we want them to think of ‘Earth Warriors’. That’s our ultimate goal. c

If you’d be interested in hearing more about Earth Warriors, you can get in touch on hello@earthwarriorsglobal.com or visit the website earthwarriorsglobal.com