Climate Change: Is Education Enough?

Climate change and environmental damage are key issues for modern society. For both, often overlapping issues, education is usually viewed as one of the key ways to help to solve these problems. The thinking seems to be that by increasing people’s awareness of the issues, by educating them as to the causes and impacts of actions then they will better understand the magnitude as well as their role in producing environmental damage and so act to change their behaviours to reduce or even eliminate their impacts. But is such a view a reasonable one, is it one that is likely to produce effective results?

The current cabinet of the UK government has numerous individuals who have had the best education that money can buy as have a great many world leaders. Other key politicians, business leaders and decision makers have had the benefits of a degree-level education. So the political and economic leaders with the power to implement changes are also, for the most part, highly educated. A large number of these leaders do not seem to believe in climate change or at least he magnitude of the problem. So education in the case of these individuals seem to have no impact on their understanding of environmental damage and seems, In some cases, to have resulted in the denial of such damage being the fault of humans at all.  

Moving from this power elite to more ‘ordinary’ people does education have any importance for resolving climate change and its impacts? A lot of policies for resolving climate change focus on the individual and the steps individuals can take to reduce such things as their carbon footprint, . This may not be a surprise in a market -focused economy as the individual is meant to be the key entity that makes decisions and acts within the market. The reasoning seems to be that if individuals change their behaviour then the issue can be solved. It is the individual who must change and if they are more aware of the problem, if they understand their role in the problem more fully and if they can be shown key actions to resolve the problem, then they will act. The solution to the problem of climate change, in this reasoning, is to change the actions of the individual within the current political and economic framework. Education provides the ‘nudges’ to change individual beliefs and behaviours. If this fails then it is the fault of individuals not understanding or educators for not sending out the appropriate, targeted message.

If this really the case though? Can climate change really be solved without tackling the pollical and economic system that has produced it? Is it individuals who need to act or is it larger entities such as businesses, governments and large corporations that need to take action? Is the scale of the problem beyond the scope of nudging slight changes in the behaviours of individual consumers?  Individuals and education are vital for resolving climate change but the nature of that education needs to widen beyond the identification of the problem and nudges of current behaviours. Hard as these are to achieve, the even more difficult aspect is to educate individuals in how the whole economic and political system is involved in producing climate change. Understanding this could persuade individuals to take more concerted political action to change the views and behaviours of larger entities such as governments and corporations. This is much more difficult to achieve as such understanding would force individuals to question the political and economic basis of their current lives. Such fundamental questioning is one of the hardest thing anyone can do, but questioning is a key feature of education.