ALM UNDP

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Background: I have been working at UNICEF as a consultant on climate change and environmental education for the past two and a half years. We’ve been advocating for holistic, quality education through schools. All children have a right to quality education and it is a cornerstone of development.

Quality education is absolutely necessary to achieve sustainable progress on climate change adaptation by creating an empowered and capable citizenship with the knowledge, skills and values needed for local innovation and scale up of adaptation projects. While funding runs out and physical structures disintegrate, education creates a sustainable source of local capacity and local solutions far into the future.

Though the rationale is clear, evidence of the impact of education on children’s resilience or on climate change adaptation is hard to come by, presenting a challenge to our advocacy and country support. There are several contributing issues, one of which is the need to develop measurable indicators at the local and global level which can serve as the basis for meaningful evaluation.

Question:

• What evidence is available to indicate the success of quality education in the context of climate change adaptation and children’s resilience?
• What indicators have been used and/or should be used to evaluate the success of quality education interventions in addressing climate change impacts and resilience?

Thank you in advance for any evidence, insights or suggestions you may have. We would be able to incorporate them into our advocacy and evaluation strategies and they would definitely help us move this work forward at the global and country – level.

All ALM users are welcome to contribute over the next 4 months of open discussion (the topic will close at the end of May 2011).

Suchitra Sugar

Consultant, Climate Change and Environmental Education

Education Section, Programme Division

UNICEF House, 3 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017

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