IEFG BIG Series: The Things That Can Happen When Education and Climate Meet

Welcome to the IEFG Brains in Gear Series. In this inaugural episode exploring education philanthropy and the climate crisis, we examine "The things that can happen when education and climate meet."

This episode explores a pivotal question: Can education funders fulfil their missions without addressing climate change? As host Sally Vivyan notes, "You can't be an education funder in lower and middle-income countries if you aren't thinking about intersections with climate." Our four discussants challenge us to recognise that most education funders are already climate funders - they're just not realising it yet.

Sally Vivyan, Co-Director of Gower Street, leads a spend-out grant maker focused on climate crisis intersections with education in Ghana and globally. She previously worked in international development and migration, holds a PhD in charity leadership, and continues writing on philanthropy topics. 

Naghma Mulla, CEO of EdelGive Foundation, has spent over a decade transforming collaborative philanthropy in India. Under her leadership, EdelGive evolved from grant-making into a philanthropic asset management platform bringing together diverse stakeholders to co-design ambitious projects for India's most marginalised communities.

Francesca Beausang, Global Director of Communication and Partnerships at the Pharo Foundation, brings unique experience spanning academia and corporate finance. After completing her PhD at Cambridge University and lecturing at LSE, she transitioned to macroeconomics, covering emerging and developed markets. She has authored two books on globalisation and multinationals.

Ross Hall, Education Portfolio Lead for Fondation Botnar, models system change architecture, ensuring holistic child development while communities learn to thrive together, focusing on sustainable educational frameworks supporting individual growth and collective resilience.

Christina Kwauk, Ph.D., social scientist and policy analyst specialising in girls' education, 21st century skills, and gender-education-climate intersections. Co-editor of "Curriculum and Learning for Climate Action" and co-author of "What Works in Girls' Education," she serves as an education consultant at Unbounded Associates and co-founder of Unbounded Alliance.

Through candid discussions, these five reveal how climate change intensifies inequalities, examine barriers preventing greater climate education investment, and offer practical solutions for moving from indirect to direct climate action through education. From insights on India's education system, where only 120,000 of 1 million schools have eco clubs, to Kenyan water bank schools boosting attendance up to 95%, this conversation provides sobering realities and inspiring innovations.

The discussion emphasises education as the strongest predictor of adaptive capacity while warning against limiting impact to indirect links. Speakers advocate for intentional climate education integration, systemic resilience approaches, and collaborative action moving beyond silos to create change at the scale and speed our climate crisis demands.

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Transcript

Yasmein: You are listening to the Brains in Gear podcast series on education philanthropy and the climate crisis, brought to you by the International Education funders group IEFG In this episode, we explore the synergies between education and climate action, asking a pivotal question, can education funders fulfill their missions without a clear commitment to addressing climate change? Our host today is Sally Vivian from Gower Street. 

Sally: Hello. Welcome to the first episode of The Big series on education, philanthropy and the climate crisis. The big series is a series of podcasts curated by the International Education funders group IEFG around varied themes most relevant to the current global landscape in education. I'm Sally, your host for this episode, and in this episode, we will start our series by exploring a critical question, what are the synergies between education and climate? Can education funders meet their goals if they don't commit to climate action, you can't be an education in lower and middle income countries Funder, if you aren't thinking about intersections with climate. You are all working with people who are experiencing the disproportionate effects of the climate crisis. Education systems in a non climate resilient context, will fail to provide our children with a quality education. Equally, education can play a major role in addressing the climate crisis through education people learn how to mitigate, adapt and cope with the devastating effects of the climate crisis. 

This series aims to support you in your role as an education funder, engaging with the growing imperative of climate action. It seeks to highlight your current position within the climate education landscape. Acknowledge the contributions you are already making, and provide guidance for expanding your impact by drawing on leading examples and best practices from across the education philanthropy sector. This series aims to foster shared learning, strengthen collaboration and promote collective action in advancing Climate Education. 

Today, we have the privilege of being joined by an outstanding lineup of speakers, each bringing valuable insights and expertise on the intersection of education and climate. We're joined by Christina Kwauk of unbounded associates. 

Christina: Thank you so much Sally, it's a pleasure to be here with you all today. 

Sally: Naghma Mulla of the EdelGive Foundation. 

Naghma: Thank you. 

Sally: Francesca Beausang of Pharo Foundation, 

Francesca: Thank you 

Sally: And Ross Hall of Botnar Foundation. 

Ross: Thanks so much. 

Sally: Welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you all in today's episode, education funders contribute to the resilience of communities facing the impacts of climate change, even if their work does not explicitly target climate education. Almost every IEFG member is already a climate funder. They are reducing vulnerability and improving the livelihood opportunities and health prospects of the communities most at risk from climate change by improving access to quality education, it would surprise us to find many of the grantee partners of IEFG members who are not dealing with the usually disproportionate effects of the climate crisis, which are undoubtedly having severe impact on education. Despite this, we find a reluctance to acknowledge that this is the case with some, although by no means all, seeing the climate and education funding spaces as zero sum, rather than seeing the opportunities that each brings to support the aims of the other. 

Although most of you are already climate funders, you may not realize it. In this episode, we invite you to reflect on the impact you're already making, and consider how your current efforts align with climate related goals, because it can be overwhelming to know where to start. To start our conversation today, let's explore a critical question, how are different regions contributing to and affected by climate change and by actively promoting access to safe and quality education in the areas that are most disproportionately affected. How are education funders implicitly helping vulnerable populations to be better equipped to respond to climate related challenges? 

Christina, I'm going to post that question to you first.

Christiana  

So in reflecting on the question, I always like to start by anchoring myself in the fact that while climate change doesn't discriminate, its impacts do, and its impacts discriminate because of structures of exclusion, inequity, inequality, that all have historic roots in colonialism, industrialization, extractive capitalism and so on. So for example, some of the most climate vulnerable countries around the world are low and middle income countries like Pakistan Bangladesh, or their countries in conflict and crisis, like Somalia or South Sudan or Myanmar or their small island developing states in the Caribbean and the Pacific, all that have contributed very little to our present climate crisis and yet are experiencing a disproportionate burden of the catastrophic loss and damage from climate related shocks and stressors. Years and so many of these countries also experience high rates of educational inequality and low rates of formal educational access and completion. So not only are they more vulnerable to climate change today because of the legacy of colonialism, but their populations are also hamstringed and their capacity to adapt to respond to climate shocks because of chronically underdeveloped education systems, or low access to climate relevant knowledge and skills and so on. So when you look at this further at the population level, these lines of injustice carry further. When you look at the legacy of patriarchy or racism or ableism, there's a lot of anecdotal and empirical evidence of the disproportionate burden that girls and women bear when it comes to the impacts of climate shocks on their opportunities to go to school, build skills, develop leadership and agency, participate in income generating activities, and the list goes on. And there's also lots of evidence around how climate shocks and stressors exacerbate gender based violence, which impacts their ability to thrive and flourish even further so when funders are investing in access to safe and inclusive and quality education for these populations or for countries more broadly, yes, funders are also indirectly funding climate resilience and climate adaptation. The research repeatedly demonstrates that education is the strongest predictor of adaptive capacity, and that we need to ensure that populations continue to have these barriers removed, and they're able to overcome these barriers. The relationship between education and adaptive capacity is based on looking at data on access to education and education's impact on income levels. And I think ultimately, if we're banking climate resilience on education's income generating potential, that significantly limits our collective impact as a sector to the lowest possible level of ambition. What I'm saying here is that if our goal is to get children and youth to go to school and to complete more years of schooling, then our impact as a sector is constrained by an indirect link, at least as we currently understand the data. That indirect link is to increase levels of climate awareness. But imagine if we shifted from talking about access to education to talking about the quality of that education. And what if we were talking about whether or not children have the opportunity to learn about the causes, the impacts and the solutions to climate change as they're relevant to their local context, or what if we're talking about children and whether or not they have the opportunity to build a breadth of green skills that are necessary to engage in climate mitigation, climate adaptation and the behaviors that enable resilience and later opportunities to participate in local, national and global transitions to a greener and cleaner economy. I wanted to point out that, you know, a few years ago, UNESCO and the Mies project identified that just over half of 100 countries national curriculum and their national curriculum frameworks mention climate change. Analysis that I conducted with education international a few years ago found that just about a third of countries nationally determined contributions which are country's national climate strategies mentioned climate change education. So it's in this context where every year, we are consistently breaking temperature records, and we're getting closer and closer to exceeding planetary tipping points. I think we want to see education funders who are indirectly funding climate action through education investments to move towards increasing their direct funding on climate action through education there. I think we need to do a better job demonstrating to education funders that this isn't mission drift at all, but rather the evolution of their investments to be more fit for purpose, and that purpose is to ensure that present and future generations can navigate and thrive and flourish even amidst climate change.

Naghma   

I would like to take moment and appreciate what Christina was saying that we all indirectly do fund climate change, because everything is so intellect and so intersectional, and that distress comes from a mix and a convolution of many problems, instead of something that's very pure as access or quality education or Climate change, and in an ideal world, everything that we fund would impact or enable our grantees and their communities and the communities they serve to be able to manage it. But if we step back a little bit and look at what actually happens, and I'll just quote some maybe numbers from an India perspective, India has about 9 million children that suffer from distress migration. India also has a budget of 18 billion on education, out of which, can you guess how much they spend on climate education? Environmental education, it is 7 million. That is the amount they have. Eco clubs in about 120,000 schools where awareness of climate crisis and how to manage it is taught to children, 120,000 schools out of 1 million schools. And even in private philanthropy, I could see, you know, just like two or three names who were consciously going after environmental education as a part of how they serve communities. And the tragedy is, many. The tragedy is that, as funders ourselves, who have been traditionally funding a large and I speak of the larger sector, we have been isolated in terms of we're funding climate, we're funding education. Climate as an ecosystem has been jargonized. It's an exclusive piece. We have to jump through an extra hoop to understand what people are saying when they're saying climate mitigation, adaptation and transition, how and how that impacts the child in the school. This is the mistake that even we were making till about a decade ago, when we thought we were funding gender because we were funding awareness in schools. We were funding management of distress migration because we were funding schools. But we learned through our own errors about a decade ago that unless there is intentionality, unless there is some amount of funding that is just going into understanding data that is being thrown up through our interventions, it will all be little sparks in the dark and really not impact. It would be a bit of an overkill to say that any of us is impacting the lives of these children who are under our education portfolios. And that is, I think, a real problem from an India perspective. India has more than 140 bio regions. India has at least five, six floods a year, and droughts are happening at the same time. Today, Bangalore, a premium city, is completely submerged under water. And at that time, what happens is, as soon as we see a crisis like this, the money moves out of education into something like rescue and rehabilitation, completely, leaving these children abandoned. They're abandoned by philanthropy. They're abandoned by government systems, and they're also abandoned by societies who have to then migrate in distress. There is a lot of potential, I think there is also an amount of intention, but intention, unless it is converted into designed action, is not going to give us what we really, really seek.

Sally:   

Francesca, is there anything you'd like to add? 

Francesca: 

It has been very interesting for me to hear from Christina and Naghma that are very conceptually rooted. I think maybe I will chip in with a bit more of a practical experience from Pharo foundation. We're very much at the beginning of our journey in climate education. For the moment. We have separate interventions on climate and on education. On the climate front, we're focused on Somaliland because within our target region of the Horn of Africa, it's obviously disproportionately affected by drought. And we're talking about a country, you know, has received about 300 millimeters of rainfall annually, between 2004 and 2023 with a 50% decline over this period. You know, if you're going to be operating there. It's basically something that you absolutely have to tackle. So to address this, you know, we've been building these mega dams. They're called heffier dams. We've built a number of them already. But really on the education front, we've designed, built, and we now operate eight schools and a vocational training center across Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Somaliland, where we do have one of our strongest footprints in education. So our schools already provide access to quality education, which you mentioned Christina was critical in countries that are vulnerable to climate, and they have a strong focus on STEM which is obviously a good grounding for vulnerable populations to understand climate change clearly. You know, from our perspective, to respond to climate change, we need to go further. And in a country like Somaliland, where water scarcity is such a severe constraint on economic and human development, education has to provide specific pathways to tackle the water constraint. So we started to think about education models that can provide our pupils from early childhood education onwards, with tools to think creatively about the solutions to climate change. But we're thinking about incorporating elements of a climate curriculum which are adapted to the local context. I think the aim here is to shape people's own solutions to the local manifestations of the global climate change problem. I'm sure many of you have come across this, but Cambridge, for instance, has very interesting water curriculum they developed for the Himalayas. It's called the panipahar, and it's got lots of modules on practicals, on sources of water, river processes, etc, but it's only useful for Himalayan conditions, not the very different conditions we have in Somaliland. But you know, it's an interesting source of inspiration. Just one thing I want to mention to illustrate all of this is, you know, in Somaliland, we had a young graduate in water engineering, who volunteered for us, and she put forward a great idea. She suggested using Moringa seeds, which are native to Somaliland, to purify the water from our dams, as an environmentally sustainable solution to our water purification issues. The seeds can be ground into a powder and used as a natural coagulant. And and this, for me, is the kind of example that we want to incorporate into the curriculum to get the children thinking about the resources they already have in their countries and how to put them to good use, really.

Sally 

So climate change is intensifying existing inequalities and exacerbating society's most pressing challenges, making solutions even more complex. This reality underscores why philanthropy cannot afford to overlook the climate crisis by focusing solely on immediate funding priorities. They risk ignoring climate related threats that could undermine their broader efforts. Yet, despite the clear need education funders have been slow to prioritize climate education. What are the barriers preventing greater investment in this space? Why is integrating climate education into philanthropic strategies so challenging? I'm going to come to you first this time Ross.

Ross

Francesca, you talked about you have a separate climate and education fund. So classically, climate and education are seen as separate problems in the way that climate and often regeneration are seen as separate issues. But of course, all of these things are interconnected, and there's an obvious problem there, when we see these things as not interconnected, the other problem is when we do see that they're interconnected, you've then got a new set of problems, which is, wow, this is so complex. What do we fund? What are we going to see in terms of results? What are we funding? Where are we funding? We know this is also requiring long term funding. So how quickly are we going to see results? So you've got a problem of either not facing the interconnectedness of all of this, or facing it and then seeing another set of problems from a funders perspective. And I also think just to add to that, then to give us a bit more nuance when we look at the realities of climate change and education, I speak to people working in climate and environment all the time, and they all say part of the solution must be in transforming the education system, but they often don't quite know what that means in practice. Similarly, people very increasingly in education, to your point, Christina, who are wanting to invest in quality education, realize there's a need to develop green skills, etc, but again, they don't quite know what that means in practice. And you know, for many people, we're still in the subject of trying to get social and emotional learning mainstreamed. That's been around for, I don't know how many years. Catching up is a big challenge. My sense is I think there might be two ways to think of this could be helpful, from a funder's perspective and maybe from a practitioner's perspective, when we think about climate change, and when I think about climate change, rather, I think as an umbrella term to include a host of other things like biodiversity loss, soil degradation, clean water problems, food security, food sovereignty, etc, and recognizing that those interconnected environmental problems are now leading to significant challenges for people who are most affected problems of malnourishment and poverty, all The stress etc, on young people, their families and communities. But of course, that then also has a knock on effect, because these problems start to displace people. We've already heard this idea, this problem of migration, so we're going to see increasing challenges around forced migration and all the things that come with that conflict, growing inequity, etc, etc. So this is what I mean by the complexity of the problem. But it also, to me, points to the urgency of addressing this problem. So there are, broadly, I think, two issues here, one of which is, first of all, the need to address the complexity upfront and to recognize that, on the one hand, it directly affects the learning and well being of young people and their communities. And the second thing that it does, it disrupts the functioning of the education system. There are fewer teachers, or there are more migrants, or whatever that may be, in simple terms. So you've got this problem of, on the one hand, learning of individuals, and on the other hand, of resilience of functioning disruption of the education system. So for me, the need here is to start to look at the problem through these lenses. How can we provide a quality education to build the skills and competences of young people. This means green skills. It means environment, climate awareness, well being awareness. It means the development of resilience, empathy, agency to act, etc. So really taking a view of holistic development of young people so that they can survive and thrive through the. These environmental challenges. The other piece of that is to take a very deeply systemic approach and to say, what can we do to make the system itself more resilient to the disruptions that are coming through climate and environmental challenges?

Naghma   

I love what Ross has just said. And I would just add one more thing to it, when we are funding climate, and I'll use an example, we were supporting education programs in the Far East, as well as the far west of this country, in India and in the far west, it was a desert land. It was very hot. In the east, it was on the borders, very, very flood prone. And in both places, we were funding education of girls, and it was a very typical thing to measure them against the marks, and, you know, see competency and all of that. And we started seeing something very, very wrong when we started delving into the context of the girls who were attending in the far west, in all the heat, the patriarchy was such that women were not allowed to step out of home. So in case she suddenly stopped showing up, or her grades start falling, it means that she has been married off, which means premature marriage and all of that. And that means we have lost a life. The child you know, has dropped out from education. The same time in the Far East, the women are actually working with younger age, so it looks like patriarchy is not in action, but it is a flood prone area. It is a border area. So girls are encouraged to get out of homes and work. They have only native language access. As soon as a girl stops attending school, it means she's been trafficked. You know, suddenly it changes everything. Our focus on checking whether math and science is being covered or they've been able to progress in English suddenly becomes so low down the ladder, we started funding a tuition program in the Far East. So we know that the longer she is in the system, the more protected she is. So the reason why I'm saying this is that there are some system organized programs, some system change programs, but a lot of funders fund smaller programs. The only thing that I feel we really need to do is check the context of the community, because sometimes data only speaks Half The Story numeracy and literacy and quality is going to show us only one side you have a high quality education student going back into a very violent home that is very dangerous and very prone to whatever crisis comes. So as funders, we also need to look beyond the headline data and respond accordingly, and that is our duty. 

Francesca 

I feel both points really resonate with me. I'll start with the point Ross raised on how things are not seen as interconnected, definitely. I mean, that's the most obvious challenge. Is that, consequently, education and climate groups work in silos. I had the same problem when I was trying to create a common agenda across education nutrition groups actually with the IEF to promote school meals, an intervention that will produce positive outcomes in both learning and nutrition. I think the power of a common platform is very often overlooked because, you know, individual agendas seem to run the risk of being diluted, I guess. But also for philanthropists, I think committing resources to a relatively new area like climate education can be uncomfortable, especially if evidence of the impact of climate education might still be in the making, as you were saying, in a sense, Nagma. So I think that's where diversification of risk through partnership can be helpful, if the silos can be overcome. But from my perspective, I think at a practical level as well, climate education is not straightforward, and therefore it's not an easy win. There are challenges with finding the right pedagogy and the right pedagogues for climate education, and we need to foster creativity in teachers really to begin with. They have to want something more than delivering a standard numeracy or literacy oriented curriculum. They have to be ready to break new ground. And the other issue is that school systems are often organized according to disciplines, and obviously climate change isn't. So we need to resort to different teaching methods and an interdisciplinary approach. You need a lot more experience oriented projects, actions, so on. And here I just want to mention again, I love examples, an example that really brings the concept of climate education to life for me. And it's the Kenyan water bank schools. The first one was built in rural Laikipia, and so the school's roof harvests rainwater, which is stored in a central cistern with a filtration system, and classrooms are positioned to face in towards the rainwater harvesting courtyard, and there are also crops grown there. So the system really provides water, but it's also a learning tool and an education center. So in class, the Pugh. Pupils demonstrate what they learn about sustainable rainwater harvesting through firsthand experience. Now what is even more interesting for the education crowd is that this hybrid approach has a positive impact on education outcomes per se. So after the construction of water bank schools, school attendance has risen by anywhere between 25 and 95% depending on the school. And this makes sense, right? You've got a practical education centered on a local challenge, obviously, is going to boost pupils motivation and their understanding of what they can do with their education to solve their community's challenges. So I think it's really quite powerful, because it ensures pupils are creative participants in their education, and, you know, it equips them with relevant knowledge and really towards employment in the jobs of tomorrow. For me, climate education really opens up this possibility of a modern, practical and employment oriented education, which produces critical thinkers, which is the ideal scenario, really.

Ross

And could I just to jump in on that? Francesca, I love what you're saying. I think this is exactly where we need to go. You know, the big danger in my mind is that even for those school systems that adopt climate education, it ends up as two o'clock on a Friday afternoon. Okay, kids were doing climate education, and you'd spend half an hour, I don't know, doing whatever it needs to be fully integrated. We need to find these, as you rightly say, I think these hybrid interdisciplinary experiences rooted in community. And one of the big areas of intersection that I feel very hopeful about is the intersection between food and learning. I think there's a very powerful connection whereby young people can learn anything you want, through the growing food, through the harvesting, the preparation, the preparing, the cleaning of food, you can learn all of the academic subjects, and you can learn social and emotional Skills, testing, the preparation, the preparing, the cleaning of food. You can learn all of the academic subjects, and you can learn social and emotional skills, green skills and climate education together. And I think that similar to the example you gave, gives me a lot of hope that there are these hybrid pedagogical approaches for the solutions that we need. 

Sally 

Really good to hear some positive examples, and you're now turning us towards solutions. So how can education philanthropy drive meaningful progress in Climate Education? 

Christiana  

I am just really enjoying hearing what my fellow speakers are saying. I think just again to point to the importance of thinking about climate issues as a systems issue, it requires then a coordinated response across the entire education system, from teachers to food systems to curriculum to the infrastructure to the procurement within the education system and so on. Right if we were to try to focus our attention to what are some kind of key bucket areas or channels through which education philanthropy and education funders could think through or structure their own thinking. It's three things that education philanthropy can do so one is to identify and invest in education programming with climate benefits or climate outcomes. For example, if you're interested in foundational learning or in basic literacy and numeracy or in remedial education, especially for socially and economically marginalized girls, you can invest in programs like seed, which is an initiative of the unbounded alliance that teaches foundational literacy and numeracy through a climate lens that centers gender responsive pedagogies. So a program like that might draw on climate related reading materials or provide teachers with training on how to integrate climate related topics and examples into the math teaching, right? So that's something that Francesca had raised up earlier, too. Or if you're interested in digital skills or STEM skills, or in vocational training, you can invest in programs that incorporate green skills, or that partner with climate tech organizations, or with decarbonizing industries like energy or manufacturing, or industries that need to adapt to climate change, like health or even education, as we were speaking about it today, and all these industries need a workforce that can help them make this transition. So we have a couple of really good examples of programs and organizations that are doing this and solutions book that my colleagues and I developed with UNICEF and Ali and World Bank last year. Aside from all the really great programs that are doing specific works, they're also really great global and regional networks like the greening Education Partnership, or the global response to education environment network. You're all trying to actively advance synergies between education and climate and also coordinate sort of a global response and global efforts to that. Second thing I think that education philanthropy can do is to get outside of the education bubble, and to talk to your climate colleagues in your foundations even about how they can invest more in climate action with education co benefits. So co benefits in quote, unquote climate speak, basically means that you have additional benefits or positive outcomes that result from investments in climate mitigation or climate adaptation solutions. It's almost like when you get a buy one get one free kind of offer at the store, right? So you're investing in a climate solution that also benefits education or could also benefit health, or can benefit social equity or the economy gender equality. So as an example, if your climate colleague is investing in low carbon emitting construction materials or in new energy efficient technologies or a nature based solution for drought mediation. Could your climate colleague direct that investment so that the technology is deployed across schools in a climate hotspot? So that wouldn't just help the school system save energy or reduce emissions, but it might also help address energy poverty that is preventing schools from taking place in a classroom, or could improve air quality at the school, or help free up funding for teaching and learning activities, because you have managed to reduce costs on energy, for example. So the idea here is that we want to help direct more and new financing sources to education, right? So to climate smart and climate resilient education systems. And I think the third one, the third piece, might be a little bit more abstract and conceptual, but I would encourage education funders to think creatively, think systemically, think outside of the box, in terms of how you can demonstrate to your boards or to your founders that investing in education driven climate solutions as well as your climate solutions with education co benefits is mission critical as just an example, right? So right now I'm supporting a bilateral donor to map all the potential pathways in which education investments can have an impact on climate outcomes, and then therefore identify ways that investments in education could be essentially tagged as climate financing, because when we think about funding climate related activities in education, we typically think about funding climate resilient infrastructure, your rainwater harvesting, or your solar panels, or your heat reflective paint, or we're talking about integration of climate change into the curriculum. These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes. Comes to how education investments can impact climate and how climate solutions can help enhance education, I think we need more education philanthropy that's willing to help us as a sector to identify all of those direct and indirect ways that we can support climate action and therefore help us as a sector raise our climate ambition and our potential climate impact. And to do that, we need to test methodologies. We need to measure relationships longitudinally, as well as in the short term, in order to strengthen our ability as a sector to prove the positive impact that we have on climate outcomes. And then to do that, we need to have a bit of an experimental mindset among education funders. We need to be able, to be willing to try things out at different scales, and to do things differently, very differently, right? And of course, of course, correct when we need to.

Naghma 

100% yes to that. The fact is that most people don't. I see three things that when I've observed have helped the cause. One is a lot of networking beyond the education sector, we need to learn from our peers. The network of education funders. Only talking to education funders comparing results is not going to work. Second is we need to go on field visits together. I often wonder why we do field visits like a personal journey. We can club in and go to places that we don't fund just to be curious about what's happening in other places, we can invite our peers to join us. Why it has to be such a solo expedition always puzzles me why we do field visits in such isolation. Join the dots between what we fund and what we see. That should be one of the things. The third thing that I feel becomes very imperative if you want a sector level shift, is we need to get our boards to understand I feel some joint board meetings on the field, some join field visits there. I know it's the most toughest thing, and that's why it doesn't get done, because calendars are so busy. But the fact is that most of the time those folks, or the people in authority who are really well meaning, who really want to do good, and who are signing the checks have no concept of what school looks like today because they have never seen it. They've not visualized it. The idea of a school being impacted by climate is theory to them. Even for us, when we go into the field and watch this play out, it is gut wrenching. That has a very different impact on how we respond and how we write reports and how we engineer more funds there. So I feel that there is a lot to be done to get to this place. We are very under prepared. If you want to move the sector, make it evolve. We are not informed enough. We are not networked enough, we are not engaged enough. And unless we do that, that inflexion point is not going to come. We're just going to keep counting math and English marks.

Ross

Yeah. And just to build on that, for me, this requires us to face up to the reality of this, the reality of the complexity of this and the interconnectedness of it all. I think too many of us are turning away from the complexity of it. And I think we need to do that. I love that idea Christina, of building in explicit outcomes, climate, environmental outcomes, which are co benefits, building that into our work, into all of our work, to force us to reflect on the implications of our work on environment, at least. And I think this stepping into the complexity requires us to take an ecosystemic mindset. I often talk about learning ecosystems, you know, seeing beyond the walls of the school to looking at the relational aspects. This is a practice, again, of weaving people and projects together, and through that ecosystemic relational lens, I think we will then start to see that there is a need not for investing in silver bullet projects, but for rather investing in the enabling conditions that underpin the learning ecosystem, And effectively, in other words, to invest in portfolios of projects, projects which are mutually reinforcing, and I think those projects need to be clearly grounding in the lives of real people. Too often I see projects which are drifting around at the national and international level and never finding their way into creating real change in real people's lives. We have to involve deeply young people and their communities in creating these portfolios projects, and of course, they need support from above. So there's also a need to create enabling policies at national and international levels of sharing evidence from above, etc. What that also requires is a long term commitment to change. And what that means is also got to be learning and iterating as we go, and that, I think, brings us right to the beginning, because this is not just learning and to iterate these sort. Stand Alone projects, but to commit to sharing those learnings so that we can connect and move everyone together with strong evidence.

Sally 

Thank you, everyone that's fantastic. Some really tangible and hopefully achievable recommendations there, I'm going to draw us to closing thoughts, what collective actions can education philanthropy take to advance climate education? How can funders collaborate to drive meaningful long term change and ensure that climate education is effectively integrated and prioritized in their work?

Christiana 

Thanks for the question. Sally, I think just again to reiterate what everyone is saying we're facing the greatest of all systems challenges. With the climate crisis, we see one slight change in temperature has ripple effects across every sector, and these ripple effects look different, they feel different. They have different reverberations wherever you go, right? So to be effective, yes, we need collective action, but we need collective action at different scales. We need collective action that's local driven by and responsive to local needs, local experience, local knowledge. Yet the same time, we need collective action that moves all of these local collective actions globally in the same direction, right? So Francesca mentioned the need to have this common, shared goal, right that helps us all direct our attention towards a shared, collective outcome. I think education funders in that context have a really important role to play in providing the fuel that's needed for that movement. They have critical resources that communities and organizations and initiatives don't have, and by partnering with these actors and distributing these critical resources to them, education funders can really help to propel that action and that change at the scale and the speed that we need. And another aspect of what can education funders do to help support this collective action? What do they bring is that they also have perspective and perspective to see what's going on at all of these different scales. They can be the eyes and the ears at 30,000 feet and see the whole forest right. They can help enable and coordinate all the action that's happening at three feet or at 30 feet, and allow those folks who are in the forest, who are the tree, to allow them to move and move more meaningfully together towards the shared goals. And so that means, I think maybe Ross had said this earlier, but that means not only facilitating open and radically transparent communication and sharing information across actors, but it also means identifying ways to help transform the structures and the systems that create obstacles, right, the obstacles that exclude some communities, and how we can remove those or systems, ways that our systems work that create scarcity and create unnecessary competition, and how we might transform those into channels of abundance, you Know, channels for collaboration, so that we can collectively at multiple scales, move towards the right direction. What is the collective action for funders, right? And I think part of that is enabling these movements to happen at different scales, and keeping a really close eye to what's happening at those different scales, and helping to move that in one direction, given the degree of variation that has to happen.

Sally   

Locally Naghma, do you have some final thoughts for us? 

Naghma  

I think we are very, very far away from a collaborative action that can move the ecosystem. I may be sounding very negative about it, but it's not negative. It's just practical. We are all too caught up in our individual systems and our individual goals and our theories of philanthropies and theories of changes, I would actually have a very simple ask to begin, which is, if each one of us who's funding an education program can just do joint meetings with all other funders of the same program and discuss not the project But the context of the ecosystem. Who are the communities? Which is the caste or race the child belongs to? What is the nature of the soil? Are they inflicted with distressed migration or not just be curious about the communities we serve and do things like due diligence and joint deliberations around an organization's work with communities, instead of isolated deliberations within our own teams to see what are the targets and KPIs we're meeting. So I see that as at least something that we can do. We are talking collaboration more than collaborating. It's a huge system, but with government, with communities, and then our climate playing havoc, and human beings just being who human beings are. The complexity is so multi layered that we may not be able to move mountains from where we are today, but at least we can move mountains around this limited set of people. So we're not even doing that. I have this pet peeve that, why don't we just, you know, I think I've repeated it two, three times, why don't we just look at this one group we are funding, who lists. Let all funders come, just like we do for companies. You have your annual board meetings or your quarterly meetings, just meet everyone and discuss the entire issue instead of you know, what are my grade five students achieving at the end of the academic year?

Sally   

Thank you. Naghma, so we've got the 30,000 feet view, the single Mountain View. Francesca, what can you add with your closing thoughts. 

Francesca 

From my point of view, I would say that I think to some extent we need to be able to break down the complexity in order to communicate it more effectively. And you know, in terms of thinking about this notion of collective action, really, I think it only works if you have set the right foundations for it, starting with formulating a final goal that's quite clear, whatever it is, do you want to achieve quality climate education for X number of children by 2030 Do you want to sign a declaration on climate education? You want to try to create a new fund? Whatever it is, we need to first map the problem we're trying to solve, and specifically to map all the systems, as you all mentioned, that are affected by it, across the education and climate spectrums, and include the representatives of these systems as potential partners, whether they be education philanthropists, climate philanthropists, governments, implementers, and then we need the theory of change from collaboration and the key indicators of success and funding models. But once we've done that, because I'm a Communications Director, I will say we need to communicate this goal that we've decided on, and for that, we have to create a message that makes our tent look bigger than what many people see as this niche of climate education, and we need to highlight the intersection of interests that are affected by it. Personally, for me, the message is that climate education is the precondition of our future, and children must be equipped to craft a future for themselves and their communities. But I think we need to be quite practical again about how we go about all this. We need to find, you know, killer statistics that bring this home, killer charts that will summarize the importance of the task. And then, you know, going back to what everyone has said, I think we need to document the impact evidence on climate, education, whatever evidence we can lay our hands on to really rally all of the partners to our collective goal.

Sally

Great. Thank you. And I'm sure our listeners will see themselves in one or the other or both of those, so they're both really valuable, Ross, we're going to come to you finally for your closing thoughts.

Ross 

And think many things have been said, and I'm in a way a bit disappointed that we're all agreeing. I mean, at least if we disagreed, we would have had an excuse for not being further ahead. I have a feeling that it could be helpful if we could somehow agree a shared narrative or framework that we could use practically. You know, so often, I think one of the problems that gets in the way of collaboration is we're not quite sure we're talking about the same things. I have a feeling that maybe a shared narrative and framework that breaks down the complexity of the reality, as Francesca indicated earlier, and that we can use practically to with any group in the community, the district level, the regional and the national or international level. We can use something like this practically, to see where each other is, to locate ourselves and each other and understand each other in this field of climate education, or whatever we call it, and through that, then, once we can see each other, it's much easier to find connections between each other, potential ways of coordinating or collaborating or even co creating that could then inform our funding strategies and programming decisions, and then it could also almost serve as a learning agenda that would allow us to bring our learnings together in much more deeply usable and impactful ways.

Sally: Thank you, everybody. 

Yasmein: Thank you for listening to today's episode. This conversation offered a deeper examination of the critical intersections between education and climate. One of the key insights highlighted was that investment in safe, inclusive and quality education, particularly for populations most affected by climate change serve not only educational objectives, but also contribute meaningfully to climate resilience and adaptation. Our speakers reflected on the important role of funders who are currently contributing indirectly to climate action. The call is clear. There is a need to transition from indirect support to deliberate direct investment in climate solutions through education. The discussion underscores the importance of intentionality. How important is it to move from awareness to action? Equally, it emphasizes the urgency of collective action across education funders, community action that's informed by and responsive to local contexts and expertise, while also contributing to a cohesive global effort to address the climate crisis.

This podcast is produced by the International Education funders group, IEFG. It was curated and edited by Yasmein Abdelgany with post production by Sarah Myles. To learn more about IEFG, please visit www.iefg.org and subscribe to the podcast for further conversations on education philanthropy and the climate crisis.