Educating Adaptation And Mitigation Strategies For Climate Compatible Development: A Governance Approach

Abstract

The integration of climate change adaptation and mitigation strategiesin curricula at elementary school education to provide pro-environment knowledge, skills and attitude to foster the agenda of climate compatible development (CCD) is one of the challenges for environmental governance. To inculcate ideas of triple-win solution strategies through awareness amongst youth on relevant actions can be instrumental for promoting CCD. The elementary education, particularly in developing countries, has not yet took advantage of its role in coping with the biggest challenge of climate change by inducingpro-environment knowledge, imparting requiredskills and developing affective attitude at early age. In this conceptual framework, this article is an attempt to examine the elementarycurricula in the context of climate change education.The objective is to propose an education model to provideeducation for CCD,by employing Bloom's Taxonomy of education and rationalizing the need for its integration in elementaryeducation as contributory in implementation of environmental governance framework for CCD process. It is deciphered that climate change education, which remains a relatively nascent and under-developed domain, needs to be incorporated in school curriculum all over the world, especially in the developing countries like Pakistan. Although importance and need of integration of climate change aspects in elementary education in Pakistan has been realized, steps have been taken but relevant policies and policymakers seem insensitive of its potential to augment the process that may assist in adapting to and mitigating for climate change. Hence, there is a need to devise policy guidelines for integration of climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies in curricula of elementary education through a coordinated education and environment governance mechanism at federal and provincial levels.