Global Warming as the Overarching Focus
of Curriculum for Sustainability

• Updated May 2009 •

Students Must Learn About Climate Change
and Renewable Energy Technologies and Possibilities

Global warming is now the essential integrating theme because it has so very quickly become the greatest, most urgent problem ever to face humanity. It is now a survival issue that will have to be solved by the current generation of students, using knowledge and skills in energy conservation and renewable energy technologies that we will have to learn along with them. Time is of the essence. Our students must start this learning now.

Not helping our students learn these crucial skills and knowledge could be branded as negligent. Refusing to do it because it's not in the curriculum is simply cowardice on our part. It's time to make Life more important than the curriculum in our education systems.

It's time to ask, What is education for? It's time for teachers to take a stand and become heroes for the future.

–Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Everything we now do as educators — indeed, as human beings — is under the shadow of climate change. As Al Gore and others have said, it is the moral issue of our time.

Millions of people have already been impacted by climate change, losing their lives or their livelihoods, their food security and sources of water, their homes and their whole nations, especially in Africa, the Arctic, and small island states. This is where ethics and compassion come in. (For more data, visit Climate Change Emergency Medical Response — a website for the health and healing professions, but one that educators will benefit from reading. Please pass it on to your doctor and other health care professionals you know.)

But the reality now is that for all of us, in all regions of the planet including the northern hemisphere, a dire state of emergency exists because today's global warming greenhouse gas emissions are still accelerating, and because today's atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are still accelerating.

Scientists now predict that the Arctic summer will become ice-free between 2015 and 2030. When that happens, the climate of the entire northern hemisphere will change due to the natural cooling effect of the vast area of Arctic ice disappearing in the summertime. This puts agriculture in the northern hemisphere, along with agriculture in the southern hemisphere (which is already being affected by droughts and floods), at risk of inevitable damage by global warming. This warming will lead to acceleration in Arctic carbon feedbacks, which is potentially catastrophic for the survival of all life on Earth.

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When people say "global warming," they are actually talking about:

• global heating of the atmosphere, land and oceans
• global climate change
• global climate variation (unpredictability)
• extreme weather events all over the world
• global ocean acidification
• an increase in stratospheric ozone depletion.

So global warming is about a lot more than the break up of Antarctic ice sheets (which seems to get a lot of the attention). In 2001, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report clearly stated that the risks associated with climate change also include:

• land degradation
• water shortages and degraded water quality
• food supply disruptions and hunger
• the spread of diseases and diminished human health.

That was in 2001. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report came out in 2007. Nothing has improved since in that time. A lot has worsened. Why?

It is taking us educators a long time to realize that everything else we teach pales in comparison to the urgency, significance and consequence of global warming and climate change.

Everything else we teach will become moot — superfluous and irrelevant — if we don’t educate in a way that ensures a future.

Since RISK = PROBABILITY x MAGNITUDE,
we are now gambling with the future of life on Earth — and the odds are definitely stacking up against us.

The Role of Teachers

• understand both carbon cycles


• learn the science of global environmental change (pdf)


• find out that developed nations adopted international laws and treaties that commit them to sharing their renewable energy (carbon-reducing) technologies (and the financial aid to develop them) with less privileged countries


• learn the economics of climate change adaptation and mitigation, and have some say in what’s being done to ensure their prospects for a viable planet


• come to understand how global climate change has become the greatest social injustice ever


• leave our schools knowing how to conserve energy, reduce carbon emissions, live a post-carbon life, and install and use (perhaps even invent) renewable energy technologies.

Global warming is a compelling emergency and one that must inform all that we do as teachers and as people who care about our students, our own children, the Earth, and the future.

The best hope for today's generation of children and youth — and all future generations — is making global warming the overarching focus of our whole curriculum.


Return from Global Warming to Greening the Curriculum

Learn More at the Climate Change Primer Page

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