by Lisa Ito-Tapang

(Summary points from a presentation for the International Civil Society Forum (FISC) at Belem Do Para, Brazil, 28-30 November 2009.)

Environmental education is an issue that threaded through two global conferences this December 2009: the Sixth International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA VI) in Belem, Para, Brazil, and the 15th Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen, Denmark.

How much does adult environmental education (AEE) weigh in this time of widespread poverty, inequity and global warming? This article cites learnings and experiences of CEC-Phils in providing non-formal AEE support to grassroots communities affirms the role of education as a capability-building tool in response to the impacts of climate change.

Assymmetric Effects and Impacts on the Poor

While it is a global issue, climate change is expected to impact disproportionately on poorer nations and on the lives of the poorest of the poor and the most vulnerable of sectors within these nations. These segments of the population have historically been the most deprived of the rights and services aspired for under the Millenium Development Goals and which have been hit hardest by the impacts of neoliberal globalization.

In Southeast Asia, the most vulnerable areas include all the regions of the Philippines, the Mekong River Delta region of Vietnam; almost all the regions of Cambodia; North and East Lao PDR; the Bangkok region of Thailand; and the west and south of Sumatra, and western and eastern Java in Indonesia. Here, a significant portion of the population live in low‐lying areas, coastal or in dangerous hilly terrains which are most critical to downstream impacts of climate changes, such as flooding, landslides, and super typhoons. These natural hazards are exacerbated and complicated by the persistence of historical and socio-economic vulnerabilities among the population, such as poverty, landlessness, and joblessness, to name a few.

This was a reality that was highlighted late last September, when Typhoon Ketsana swept through the Pacific Ocean into the Asian mainland, leaving in its wake a trail of destruction throughout the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. In the Philippines, the storm caused one of the worst cases of flooding in the past four decades; the number of affected people reached almost 4 million and resulted in losses of almost 9.7 billion pesos to infrastructure and agriculture. Consider the casualties in the Philippine typhoon hits: while even the middle and upper classes were not spared from the wide reach of floods, majority of those who lost the most came from urban poor communities.

Vulnerability is higher for developing countries, poor communities, and basic sectors who lack financial, institutional, infrastructural, and technological capacity and access to knowledge, and whose countries themselves are already mired in political and economic crisis. These impacts will also exacerbate existing drastic inequities in access to adequate food, clean water, health and education services, and other vital resources and social services. Ironically, the world's minimal and marginal emitters are the first to experience the brunt of climate change impacts; while business goes on for the global GHG giant emitters.

Environmental Education as a Tool for People's Empowerment

There is an urgent need to strenthen and consolidate efforts for dialogue, education, and solidarity for coping mechanisms among peoples and across countries, as well as demand accountability from the world's largest emitters, including the G-8 and transnational corporations. Education, especially education for the grassroots, is one such tool that can potentially contribute to building solidarity on climate justice among peoples and strengthening the capacity of communities to cope with the impacts of global warming.

Education on climate change in all its forms is a right, not a privilege, that should be made accessible to those who stand to be most adversely affected by climate change impacts. While it is important to integrate environmental education in the existing formal curriculum as it is being done, emphasis must also be given to the support for non-formal educational services for the sectors who comprise the marginalized majority of our populations and the poorest of the poor. Often, they are the most dependent on these endangered ecosystems for their livelihoods and sustenance and who are located in the most hazard-prone of territories. This is a need vested with all the more urgency in this time of global warming.

Education on climate change is a political and socially-situated practice, embedded with the specificities and relations between and among classes, genders, nations, and races. As such, it has the potential to draw out a consciousness of these power relations and their consequences of these on the use and treatment of the earth's natural resource base.

Such education, in the course of analysis on the roots of the current climate crisis besetting the globe, has the potent capacity to conscienticize the population to the reality of exploitation and even plunder of natural resources and patrimony by developed nations, and ultimately raising questions of social justice and control of the earth's resources. It can contribute to raising critical awareness of the world and of the current socio-economic and cultural structures, modes, and relations of production, consumption, and distribution that have led to the current global environmental crisis. It not divorced from the development and exercise of basic rights and people's access to natural resources.

If it is to be more effective, emancipatory and meaningful for communities on the ground, such education must be anchored on a balanced combination of scientific analysis, discussion of historically-rooted realities, respect for local and indigenous knowledge, and concrete plans for action and adaptation. As such, it has the potential to facilitate a progression in the existing capacities of communities to adapt and respond to the impacts of climate change: to better understand and interpret natural disasters, to respond to climate challenges and threats, and to plan for future responses and structures for equitable development.

Yet such education must be specific to particular needs and contexts of communities on the ground, taking into account issues of how can people respond to the various impacts of climate change in addition to existing environmental problems. This includes but is not limited to rising sea levels, more frequent extreme weather events, prevalence of climate-sensitive diseases and downstream impacts on major economic sectors such as agriculture and fisheries. These must also take into account the matrix of existing environmental challenges faced by communties whose natural resources are being exploited under development aggression in the form of large-scale mining, logging, energy, land conversion and agrofuel projects.

At the local level, environmental education efforts can be directed towards capability-building of vulnerable communities. Within CEC, for instance, educational modules on climate change are being reintegrated into the Center's existing environmental education curriculum and trainings for community leaders and educators. There is an effort to identify hazards within high-risk communities and sectors, and to provide trainings and support technologies for community-based disaster management systems at the village level, particularly for early warning systems. Such educational initiatives aim to enable communities towards developing citizen science too.

At the national level, support and initiatives for environmental education on climate change can complement broader advocacy and lobbying campaigns. Linking up with a broad networks such as the Philippine Climate Watch Alliance can also be a venue towards developing modules and learning materials on climate change oriented towards the needs and contexts of specific sectors, such as fisherfolks, peasants and rural women, upland and indigenous communties, and urban poor communities.

At the regional level, environmental education projects also have the potential to build regional capacity for networking, advocacy, and sharing of good practices. Another example from CEC's own practice is the holding of a pilot Training of Asian Grassroots Trainers on Climate Change earlier this year, which aimed to enhance existing capacities of environmental educators in helping build grassroots movements to engage the concern of global warming in terms.

Emerging Challenges

The following can be seen as challenges for ongoing initiatives:

1. Asserting support for environmental education structures on the official agenda of CONFINTEA VI and the Copenhagen Climate Change Treaty, and relevant documents and agreements related to negotiations and initiatives. The recognition of the value of environmental education as a component of our response towards the global ecological crisis, as well as the guarantee to provide support mechanisms for these initiaitves, must be a principle enshrined in the texts of official documents.

While EE is explicitly tabled as a an important agenda by civil society and people's organizations, there is currently little concrete language in support of EE in the Belem Framework for Action, as a policy outcome document. There must be explicit and clear inclusion and assertion of the urgent need to develop and support EE for adults, youth, and vulnerable and marginalized communities.

Within the current COP 15 negotiations, Article 6 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) contains provisions on education, training, public awareness, public participation and access to information in relation to climate change. In addition to this, we assert that environmental education, training, and public awareness as a capacity-building effort must be:

• An interdisciplinary, progressive, and continuous process

• Aligned with national and development planning priorities to reduce people's socio-economic vulnerabilities towards disasters and climate impacts

• Considered as a vital and major part of programs for adaptation and mitigation measures

• Specific to the needs, contexts, and aspirations of communities on the ground

• Utilizing scientific, historical, and local and indigenous knowledge and technologies.

• Participatory and engaging the broadest range of stakeholders, with particular emphasis on poor and high-risk grassroots communties

2. Bringing attention and calling for action on what is generally left unsaid in the entire climate negotiations: the question of historical accountability and the need for climate justice. Environmental education on climate change not just about educating learners on the basic science of global warming, but also to be part of international solidarity effort for climate justice. The inconvenient truths in this time of global warming must be aired and addressed: the accountability of G-8 countries and large emitters among transnational corporations, the predominance of false solutions that stand to perpetruate an unsustainable, profit-driven production that is responsible for the glut of GHG emissions, and the need to support genuine solutions and action on global warming which will prioritize the people's needs over corporate greed and build the resiliency of Asian grassroots communities by working to reduce their vulnerabilities.

3.) An enabling environment for environmental education must be built. Some policy proposals include the following:

a) There has to be a comprehensive and participatory measures, both legislative and in the policy level, to integrate environmental education in all aspects of developmental learning as well as in confronting the challenge of global warming and climate change.

b) States should recognize that transparency and accountability are elements for an effective response to the implementation of environmental education focused more towards the needs of actual communities at risk and in distress.

c) Significant funding and capacity building support should be given to all stakeholders most especially those that provide educational services to the grassroots level. Government programs should be expanded and realized to reach the poorest communities in need of environmental education.

d) All stakeholders including civil society should be involved in a genuinely participatory manner the development and implementation of educational programs most especially environmental education.

e) Governments should recognize the organized role of Civil Society Organizations and involve them in a participatory manner in creating responsive mechanisms that will monitor, review as well as implement environmental education. The effectiveness of any review mechanism depends on involvement of civil society and its access to information about the process and its outputs.

f) CSOs and national governments should be urged to draw on international best practice in this area that can enhance the effectiveness of CSO intervention in this issue. A proper documentation of best practices in environmetnal education should be carried out to highlight successes for reference especially that climate change effects are imminent.