Three roles for education in climate change adaptation

ABSTRACT

Education, appropriately conceived, can be a powerful tool in enabling effective adaptation to climate change. In this article, we identify three distinct but overlapping policy uses. First, protecting and deploying education infrastructure, the social and material resources on which education depends, can reduce vulnerability and build resilience. Second, improving general education, measured in terms of literacy, school attendance, and overall academic attainment, can enhance adaptive capacity. Third, research-based adaptation learning support can accelerate social and policy change by maximizing learning before and during adaptive decision-making. Although all three are important, the unique and transformative contribution of education lies in adaptation learning support: curricular, pedagogical, and technological resources that prepare people for complex adaptive decision-making and help them solidify learning during that work. As human societies seek to balance the old social mechanisms that ensure stability with new ones that facilitate change, our capacity to systematically support the learning that undergirds adaptation may be the limiting factor.

Key policy insights

• The value of education for climate change adaptation policy has been limited by vague definitions and poor cross-field communication.

• Education supports climate change adaptation through three distinct but overlapping pathways, each offering concrete policy options: education infrastructure, general education, and adaptation learning support.

• The greatest value of education lies in the transformative potential of adaptation learning support: curricular, pedagogical, and technological resources that prepare people for complex adaptive decision-making and help them solidify learning during that work.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• adaptation
• education sector
• learning
• infrastructure
• adaptive capacity

Declaration of interest statement

N. Blum, S. Cohen, and N. Kendall provided feedback on an early draft. This work was funded in part by the Alexander von Humboldt foundation. The authors have no financial interest in this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

N. W. Feinstein http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5071-7761

Notes

1 In practice, adaptation and mitigation must be pursued together: adaptation that does not account for broader socio-ecological consequences can have perverse outcomes, and mitigation activities often represent the most efficient long-term adaptation strategies. We isolate adaptation here to clarify the distinct roles of education in adjusting to the current and anticipated outcomes of climate change.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (no award number).