🌍 Toolkit: Teach for the Planet at COP30

Education must be transformed to catalyse the fight against climate change and to support a just transition to a more sustainable world. Teachers are at the heart of greening education and have a crucial role to play when it comes to climate action.

Education International's Teach for the Planet campaign is mobilising to ensure that quality climate education becomes as fundamental as teaching reading and writing.

As the world's attention turns to COP30 in Brazil, educators, students, unions, and allies are coming together around the call for governments to provide quality climate education, to build more climate resilient education systems, and to center equity and human rights as part of a just transition to a sustainable future.

📢 Key Messages

1. Education is climate action

Transforming education is essential to fighting climate change and building a sustainable future.

2. Students deserve climate literacy

Every student has the right to learn how to protect the planet and thrive in a green economy.

3. Teachers are catalysts

Quality climate education starts with trained, empowered, and supported educators.

4. School communities must lead

Learning environments should be climate-resilient and sustainable.

5. #COP30 must center Indigenous voices

Indigenous Peoples protect 80% of the world’s biodiversity. Their leadership is not optional—it’s essential.

6. Traditional knowledge is climate science.

Indigenous food systems, forest stewardship, and ecological wisdom must shape climate policy.

7. Governments must act now

It’s time to fulfill promises made in the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda.

🔊 Key policy demands for COP30

Click here to download the demands in a PDF file.

1. Protect and empower teachers

Teachers are at the heart of greening education. To protect and empower teachers in the context of climate crisis, we need policies that:

Support educators to provide quality climate change education.
Strengthen educators’ capacity to maintain quality, inclusive and equitable education amid climate change related disruptions.
Ensure educator and student safety and well-being during climate emergencies.
Ensure quality working conditions before, during, and after climate-induced impacts.
Increase educator participation in climate change related social and policy dialogue.

2. Adapting education systems means prioritisation and funding

The role of education in promoting climate justice and transitioning to a green economy cannot be ignored, and the importance of climate resilient education systems cannot be underestimated to achieve quality education for all. Therefore, we demand that:

Education is a component of all countries’ climate plans and included in all nationally determined contributions. Advocacy from civil society here is leading to progress: since endorsing the climate and education declaration launched at COP28, 50% of declaration countries recognise the need for climate-resilient education systems, compared to 13% before (Kwauk, 2025, forthcoming). But we are still way off track.
Climate financing supports education. COP 29 agreed to mobilise only $300 billion a year through a New Collective Quantified Goal, a tiny fraction of the $1.3 trillion dollars necessary to meet the climate needs of developing countries. This COP 30 must commit to robust, grant-based financing to support developing and small island states that have done little to cause the climate crisis but are most impacted by it. Climate finance should be made available to help education systems become climate resilient.

3. The just transition needs financing and implementation

A just transition ensures no one gets left behind as we move towards a green economy; workers, social dialogue and labour rights must be at the core of implementation. We need all governments to include the just transition in their climate plans and get serious about funding its implementation. Workers must be involved and included, and any agreement must promote human rights and equity.

✊🏾 Global worker demands

Education International supports the ITUC Demands for COP30. Workers and unions demand urgent action to ensure a just transition, warning that unfulfilled promises on green jobs and inadequate investment are fueling polarisation and weakening climate policies. Find out more in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Arabic.