Let me set the scene.
It's Thursday period 6, week B, so I have geography. Geography A Level, AQA, to be precise. We’re finally studying the only part of the syllabus which specifically looks at mitigating climate change. I’m excited. Could this finally be the moment I’ve waited for?
I open the textbook - aptly titled ‘AQA Geography’, with both an ‘AQA approved’ and an ‘updated’ sticker printed on the front - and see a two page spread on mitigation. The textbook notes 3 attempts. Carbon capture and storage, tree planting, and tackling deforestation. There are 6 bullet points explaining briefly what the Paris Agreement of COP21 is. That’s it. The inevitable disappointment sets in. It’s exactly what I expected. I’m frustrated. Again.
On the 24th January 2020, Nick Gibb, the then Schools Minister, answered a written question on climate education from the opposition. Part of that response were the words:
“It is important that young people are taught about climate change and sustainability. Topics related to this are included in both the science and geography curriculum and qualifications.”
So, according to the government, climate education, or topics ‘related’ to it, are adequately included in science and geography. However, Teach the Future has already shown that limiting climate change into chemistry and geography is nowhere near good enough, and as a student taking both chemistry and geography (the two subjects which the government suggests you take to learn about climate change) at A Level (one of the highest qualifications before a university degree), I say that the provision of climate education is absolutely dismal, no matter what subjects you take.
The problem is this - the state of climate education in the UK is so bad that no one in my geography class knew what the issues with the textbook were. If you don’t either, let me explain.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is not a viable climate solution in any book. Well, apart from the AQA textbook, since that’s where it was indirectly promoted as the ‘best’ way of mitigating the climate crisis. CCS doesn’t exist on a scale that could work globally, but that isn’t really the issue. What is the issue, is that it cannot achieve net zero emissions, and it does not tackle the root of the problem. CCS allows wealthy governments and coal rich countries to continue with business as usual, relying on combustion of fossil fuels to promote short term economic growth at the detriment of the Global South.
Moving onto tree planting. Now, this isn’t so bad. It’s an easy way for countries to remove carbon from the atmosphere. But again, it shouldn’t be promoted as the be-all and end-all climate solution, because it cannot work on its own. Tree planting is often used as the escape, the easy way out, from climate breakdown as it doesn’t require any effort on the government's part. But, similarly to CCS, it does not tackle the root of the issue - the burning of fossil fuels.
Possibly the worst section of all was titled ‘modifying deforestation’, where the textbook tried to sell Brazil as a case study for successfully implementing policies to reduce deforestation, before going on to briefly mention Bolsonaro’s impact on deforestation in two sentences. A president whose greenwashing and mass deforestation could cause the collapse of an entire rainforest and its ecosystem, reduced to two sentences describing how the rate of deforestation rose to the highest level in a decade after his election in 2018.
Since all the things I have just laid out are widely accepted in the climate world, clearly, my textbook should not be taken as gospel. But it’s approved by AQA, one of the most well known A Level and GCSE exam boards in the UK. Granted, nothing in the textbook was explicitly wrong. It was, however, very one sided, and gave what was far from the whole story. Climate education, in all its forms, should be holistic - not an underwhelming 35 sentences in a 368 page textbook.
Imagine you’re someone who’s just starting their climate journey. That was me at 14/15 years old. I had no idea of the effect of climate change on the Global South, what COP was, or even if the UK government was doing anything to stop the threat of a crisis so large that humans might not even be around to face the worst consequences. I would have had absolutely no idea that what is in that textbook is very much brief, outdated information, and that there are vast chunks missing if you want to actually learn about the climate crisis in a way that is meaningful.
It’s so incredibly disappointing to see the continual neglect of climate education - limiting it to chemistry and geography, and then being further limited by the content of the textbooks it is supposedly contained in. Climate education is something we deserve, something we need in order to effectively deal with the future we have been given - it is not something we should have to ask for.
And yet, here we are, still asking, and we won’t stop. We don’t plan to.
Cover Image: Hodder Education
