Friends Meet to support CAN bill. Photo: © Keith Walton.
Call for better climate education in schools
Forty per cent of the UK’s young people ‘feel their day-to-day functioning is affected by climate distress’
A leading Quaker environmentalist has called for UK schoolchildren to learn more about the climate crisis in education.
Students should be allowed to learn about the emergency in ‘a supportive emotional environment’, said Rupert Read, along with Liam Kavanagh, both founders of the Climate Majority Project.
Citing figures that forty per cent of the UK’s young people ‘feel their day-to-day functioning is affected by climate distress’, the climate campaigners claim that students ‘don’t learn about the crisis with trained adult support’.
They also called for Labour to reverse its decision to drop its pre-election commitment to the youth group Teach The Future that climate education would be part of its manifesto. ‘Backtracking on this commitment was irresponsible and self-defeating,’ it said. ‘It should be strengthened by making sure that teachers have training to help with managing the emotions that are already arising for students.’
The call came in response to the recent defeat of the Climate and Nature (CAN) bill, which was backed by Britain Yearly Meeting and many other Quakers. Friends gathered with other campaigners outside parliament to support the bill at its second reading last month, where forty people joined a Meeting for Worship. But the bill was dropped in a last-minute deal after the government promised Labour backbenchers that they would have input into environmental legislation. According to The Guardian, concessions from Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, included: a statement on government progress towards international climate and nature targets within six months; a consultation with the bill’s supporters about forthcoming environmental legislation; and more meetings between Ed Miliband and concerned MPs.
Another priority highlighted by the Climate Majority Project was national adaptation plans. ‘Far from killing voters’ interest in reducing carbon emissions, a national effort at adaptation would heighten awareness of the need for [it],’ the group argues. Passing a national adaptation plan into law would ‘offer Britons doable ways of acting for their communities’, which would vastly increase their willingness to engage, it claims.
