Key takeaways:

• Climate change should be integrated across curricula and syllabi instead of being taught as a standalone subject.
• Effective climate education develops judgement, systems thinking and the ability to navigate uncertainty, not just awareness of the problem.
• Learning that is rooted in lived experiences builds greater agency than abstract instruction.
• India needs climate education that supports both development aspirations and climate resilience without shifting responsibility solely onto young people.
• The goal is not simply to teach students about climate change, but to prepare them to make better decisions in an increasingly conflicted and challenging world. 

Climate change is perhaps the most consequential challenge of our times. Yet, when the conversation turns to climate education, the instinct is usually to ask whether schools and universities should simply teach more about climate change. This isn’t the correct approach, in my view.

The more useful question is this: How can climate thinking become part of the way we learn across subjects, rather than another subject added to an already stacked curriculum?

To be clear, I am not an educator, curriculum designer or pedagogy expert. I come at this issue from the edges, as someone with an interest in climate change and the systems it operates in; as someone invested in how public institutions shape long-term action.Working at Asar has given me the space to stay curious without always needing immediate answers. It has also created opportunities for me to engage closely with younger people. These conversations have often been thoughtful, sometimes empathetic, and occasionally a bit disengaged. .   difficult work..  Not because students don’t care, but because they are already overwhelmed by crises, narratives and expectations. Simply keeping up with the conversation can feel like an inordinate amount of work.

My perspective is influenced in no small part by my early experiences in informal spaces. For instance, as part of the Student Sea Turtle Conservation Network, or volunteering with the Tamil Nadu Forest Department across Guindy National Park, Vedanthangal, Pichavaram, and the Gulf of Mannar. They always felt like active engagement and that’s maybe that’s why the things I learnt from them have stayed with me. Not everything useful comes with a syllabus.

Climate change  is not another topic to squeeze into an already crowded curriculum. It is the context in which many future decisions about cities, finance, agriculture, health, infrastructure and governance will be made. This is why  climate perspectives and thinking should be woven across all educational disciplines, instead of the standalone, “awareness messaging” approach with which the subject is currently taught. This idea surfaced again during a recent discussion hosted by The Hindu on climate education. One observation from my colleague Pallavi has stayed with me: that climate education cannot remain limited to explaining impacts. It must also help people make decisions in conditions of uncertainty. That sounds obvious, but translating it into classrooms is far more difficult than it appears. It requires rethinking incentives, teaching methods and assessment, not simply adding new content.

In a recently co-authored piece on climate and culture, I reflected on how cultural shifts quietly enable system-level change. In that sense, climate education is as much about shaping “ways of seeing” as it is about building theoretical knowledge. 

There is another important balance to hold in the Indian context. Per capita emissions remain modest, while development needs remain significant. Climate education should not shift responsibility disproportionately onto young individuals, especially when individual action alone is insufficient without collective and institutional change. Climate education should not place disproportionate responsibility on young people to solve a crisis largely driven by structural factors and institutional decisions. Individual choices matter, but they are insufficient.

At the same time, today’s students will become tomorrow’s planners, architects, engineers, economists, teachers and public officials. Their education will shape how they interpret growth, risk and opportunity.  A recent paper by my colleagues Arjun and Priyanka notes that education is not Climate Neutral. More education does not automatically mean better outcomes because it depends on what and how we choose to learn. In fact, emerging evidence suggests that unless education is oriented to a climate-impacted reality, it risks missing the opportunity to shape how future decisions get made. 

Agency is equally important. Through our own engagement and surveys, we have found that climate learning often creates anxiety when it remains abstract. But when it connects to lived environments, local challenges and opportunities for experimentation, it builds confidence alongside concern. It transforms climate change from something that happens to people into something they can engage with collectively.

This distinction is important because much of climate education still stops at awareness. Awareness is necessary, but it is also the easier part. Translating awareness into capability, participation and collective action is far more difficult. Increasingly, research suggests that climate education should not simply be viewed as a communication tool. It may itself become an important climate mitigation and adaptation strategy by shaping how future generations make decisions.

There are already encouraging signs of this shift, as my colleagues have noted. In Tamil Nadu, the state’s Climate Mission is beginning to integrate climate learning across more than 11,000 government schools. In Bengaluru, the Bengaluru Climate Action Cell is connecting city-level climate priorities with schools and students. Across Maharashtra and elsewhere, educator-focused programmes are helping teachers build interdisciplinary approaches to climate learning. While these initiatives remain initial experiments, they demonstrate a growing recognition that climate education is about application, not just awareness.

There is also humility in recognising that the future will not be designed entirely using today’s assumptions. Every generation works with the knowledge available to it. The next generation will inherit different technologies, different uncertainties and different possibilities. Our responsibility is not to prescribe every answer, but to equip them to ask better questions.

At its best, climate education creates space for young people to become thinkers, collaborators and architects of the future rather than passive recipients of information. It is less about instruction than about enabling curiosity, judgement and imagination.

Perhaps that is why I remain convinced that climate education should not become another school subject. It should become another way of seeing the world.