[Dani Clark] I'm welcome and good morning to everybody here in Washington, DC, and to those watching on Live, online on World Bank Live in French, Spanish, and English. We're here this morning for the launch of an important World Bank report, “Choosing our Future: Education for Climate Action. ”My name is Dani Clark. I'm with the Communications team at the Bank, and I'm going to be moving us along here today. Now, prepare to be inspired, to be challenged, and to be called to action. Today, we're talking about protecting education from climate change, but also the undeniable, yet underutilized power of education to propel climate action. You can join the conversation online with the hashtag #LivablePlanet and #InvestInPeople.
We are so happy today to have mostly students in the audience from universities here in Washington, DC. So, a warm welcome to all of you, but we also have activists here. I know many of you are activists. We have decision makers and climate change makers. We're going to hear from one activist shortly, but also from the lead author of the report, who will break it down for us in a lightning talk. And then, we'll have a rich discussion moderated by Andrew Jack of the Financial Times. If you are watching online, you can drop a comment or question in the chat, and we'll also hopefully leave some time at the end of the event for some Q&A. Now, without any further ado, I will draw your attention to a message from Elizabeth Wathuti. She is a young climate leader from Kenya and the founder of the Green Generation Initiative. This is an organization in Kenya that is helping communities implement nature-based solutions to the climate crisis while also addressing food insecurity. Let's hear what Elizabeth has to say.
[Elizabeth Wathuti] Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, and fellow change makers. My name is Elizabeth Wathuti. I am the founder of Green Generation Initiative, and I also serve as a Commissioner at the Global Commission on the Economics of Water. It is my profound I'm in honor to join you today to launch the World Bank report on education and climate change. This moment is not just a gathering of minds. It is a convergence of purpose by those of us who refuse to stand idle as the climate crisis threatens our shared future, more so that of our children and youth. As we reflect on the purpose of such reports that offer us data, understanding, and perspectives on the effects of climate change to key sectors such as education, I would also like to remind you of a simple truth. Education is not merely a tool. It is a lifeline. So, in the face of unprecedented environmental challenges, it is our education systems that must rise to the occasion, equipping young minds with the knowledge, the skills, and the resilience needed to navigate and confront this crisis. This World Bank's report provides us with a roadmap on how education can be harnessed as a force for climate action, and it highlights the crucial role that education systems play in empowering, equipping, and skilling our youth to tackle climate change. This report is a testament to the fact that we can and must adopt our educational frameworks to prepare young people for the realities of global environmental challenges such as climate change. Yet, as we stand on the precipice of change, we must ask ourselves, are our current educational models truly preparing our young people for climate realities that they will face? Are we even giving them the tools to become the leaders, innovators, and problem solvers we so desperately need? The data and evidence presented today are not just numbers. They are a call to action. They reveal the stark disparities in how different regions are equipped to handle climate challenges. From low- and middle-income countries, access to infrastructure and quality education is still a challenge. While the need for transformative educational policies is even more pressing. So, we must ensure that every child, regardless of their background, has access to the education that will empower them to contribute to climate solutions. But let us be clear, the goal is not just to teach young people about climate change, no. It is to inspire them to act, to innovate, and to lead. It is to foster a generation that actually sees climate action not as a burden, but as a profound opportunity. Our education systems must ignite passion, build skills, and even cultivate resilience. In my work at the Green Generation Initiative, I have seen the incredible potential of children and youth when introduced to conservation and when given support to address their local climate challenges. Whether it's the students growing trees to green their own school compounds in Kenya, or the young innovators leading climate movements, these stories remind us that the next generation is ready to lead, and they're just waiting for us to hand them the tools that they need. As we launch this report and look ahead, let this be a commitment to transforming our education systems with urgency and intention. Let us ensure that policies and practices align with the realities of climate change. Let us also invest in curricula that are both relevant, inspiring, and even aligned with the current climate scenarios. And let us support teachers and educators who are on the front lines of this crucial work. The future is not something we inherit. It is something that we actually create. Today, we have the power to shape that future by reimagining how we educate our children, our youth in a changing climate. Let us materialize this report to build an education system that is as dynamic, innovative, just, and resilient as the young people and the children it serves. Together, let's turn the data into action, the evidence into solutions, and the report into a blueprint for a brighter and more sustainable future. Thank you.
[Dani Clark]Inspiring words. I'd like to invite Mamta Murthi, Vice President of People of the Human Development areas of the World Bank, to give a few remarks.
[Mamta Murthi] Thank you so much, Dani, and good morning to everyone. Good afternoon, good evening, if you're watching from another location. It's absolutely great to see so many young people in the audience. I think you have lowered the average age at the World Bank by at least a few digits by being here this morning. I could not but help feel really inspired by listening to Liz just now. And as you'll hear from Shwetlena in a few minutes, the report that we've put out conducted surveys of young people in several countries, and one of the things that really stood out is their anxiety about climate change. They believe that communities are facing a climate emergency, they are both anxious, and sometimes they feel angry, but they're eager to be a part of the solution. And this is where education comes in. Education can be a tool for climate action, and yet the conversation between climate and education is typically not connected. This report is a contribution to making that connection. Now, I know I'm preaching to the converted, but let me just say it for the record, we know that education equips young people with knowledge and skills and confidence to take on meaningful action when it comes to both, their own lives, but also climate change. Education provides green skills which are needed for the transition to a low-carbon economy; and most importantly, I think by integrating climate into education, students are not just being prepared for the future, they are learning to shape the future. Now, this means making sure that education systems themselves are well financed, and they are resilient to climate change. And so, there's a two-way relationship. Unfortunately, we often emphasize the negative impact of climate change on education. That exists, there's no denying that. But we underemphasize the opportunity that education represents for climate action, to support young people in taking climate action. And that's what we're trying to do with this report. Now, as the World Bank, we put out the “World Development Report” in 2018, calling attention to the learning crisis. That was made worse by COVID, where on average, schools in developing and emerging markets were closed for one year, for one entire year. And we know from all the work that has been done since then, that the recovery from that has been incredibly slow. We know that education needs to be resourced more sufficiently and more efficiently. At the same time, we know that this is going to be a decade of low growth for low-income countries, many of which face distressing debt, sovereign debt issues, and competing priorities. So, as we think we are having conversations about bringing more resources into education, as we have those conversations, let's not have a conversation that's disconnected from the climate conversation, which is all about finding resources for climate mitigation, but also for finding resources for adaptation. And what this report shows is that there are low-cost solutions out there that can bring these two conversations together and support education systems in doing what they need to do, which is equipping young people with the skills that they need, supporting education as a tool for climate action, while at the same time making education systems resilient to climate change. So, with that, let me say no more and hand it over to Dani and to Shwetlena. Thank you so much for joining us.
[Dani Clark] Thank you, Mamta.
Now I want to introduce the lead author of this report, Shwetlena Sabarwal. She is a Lead Education Specialist here at the World Bank, but I also want to acknowledge the other authors of the report in the room, Marla, Sergio, and Diego, here with us today. So over to you, Shwetlena.
[Shwetlena Sabarwal] Thank you, Dani. Thank you, everyone. Thanks, Mamta. I'm talking about June 2024 in Sirajganj Bangladesh, and 16-year-old Nadim is facing the same problem he faces every year at this time. If it's raining, he cannot fall asleep. He keeps waking up over and over again, trying to make out if it stopped raining. And if it hasn't, his heart absolutely sinks. He knows it's going to flood. The question is, how soon, how bad, how much damage will happen to his crops, his home, his school? How long will the school be closed for? This last question is really important for him because he has to sit for these secondary examinations in February that will decide his entire future. What do we owe to Nadim and his anxiety? And the anxiety of millions of other young people who are worrying about a burning forest, an approaching typhoon, or even just the boiling examination hall they will face the next day. Now, we can do nothing and watch this anxiety morph into something else. Despair or rage, or even cynicism. Or we could work with millions of teachers and schools and talk to these young people about climate change, why it's happening and what can be done about it. Young people are desperate to have this conversation. We spoke to about 5,000 students like Nadim in Bangladesh, 88% of them want to take action for climate change; but only 32 % could answer a basic question about climate change correctly. Now, education can bridge this gap. In fact, education can be a bridge that takes millions of young people from climate anxiety to climate action and improve their lives, their future, their community, maybe their planet. So, I'm trying to sell you this bridge, okay? And when anyone tries to sell you a bridge, you should to be very skeptical. And especially in my case, not because I'm “sus,” obviously, but because the bridge I'm trying to sell you is still needing to be built. I'll try to convince you of three things. One, that education can be a bridge to pro-climate behavior change. Two, education can be a bridge to green scaling. And three, education is one of those bridges that itself needs to be protected from climate change. So, one, education as a bridge to pro-climate behavior change. Now, I'm not talking about behavior change the way it's normally talked about for climate. “Use less energy, recycle more.” It's not fair to put these expectations on the young people in low and middle-income countries that have had very little to do with causing the climate crisis, even though they are suffering disproportionately from it. I'm talking about behavior change for adaptation, flood resilience, disaster preparedness, coping better with higher temperatures. Education can be transformative for our adaptive capacity. Worldwide, education is the single strongest predictor of climate change awareness, stronger than income or age or religion. One year of education can increase climate change awareness by 9%, and this relationship is stronger when the quality of education is higher. But what makes this bridge wobbly? Are these two misunderstandings you will meet when you walk on it? The first is education only works in the long run. We have to wait for these young people to grow up to see climate action. This is not true. Young people are acting on climate now. We just heard from one of them. And they can also change the attitudes and behaviors of their parents and their communities. In India, climate-related information to children improved the climate attitudes of their parents by 13%.Parents were much more receptive to climate messaging when it came through their children. The second misunderstanding is that for education to work, we need a fancy climate curriculum. This is not true. Climate curriculum is important, but much more important for adaptive capacity are foundational skills, like literacy and numeracy. And we have a lot of work to do here. In low and middle-income countries, 70% of students cannot read or understand meaning by age 10.This is what we need to fix, but while we're fixing it, as we're fixing it, we can use climate ideas and information. So, age-appropriate, contextually relevant, simple, practical climate information as we build foundational skills for all. The second claim, education as a bridge to green skills.140 countries have set a target of net zero carbon emissions in the foreseeable future. How will they meet this target? Only by transforming their economies and the skills that drive these economies. And this is how the mythical but delicious promise of green jobs is born. This promise hangs around the room like a drunk balloon, very festive but with uncertain takeoff potential. And it's this uncertainty that makes this bridge wobbly. Many people believe that green jobs will just appear as if by magic through government or corporate action, and once these jobs are here, we can skill ourselves to work in them; but that's not how it works. Yes, green jobs create green skills, but much more fundamentally, green skills drive green ideas, green innovation, and green jobs. You can see how pervasive this misunderstanding is when you talk to young people like we did across eight low- and middle-income countries. Three out of four young people believe that they can only get a green job if they have a STEM degree. And yet, we have thousands of green jobs in India, and Kenya, and Egypt, and less than 45% of them require a STEM degree. Many young people believe that they can only get a green job if they work in the energy sector or the construction sector. And yet, there are thousands of green jobs available now in Brazil and Philippines in the food sector, hospitality sector, even the entertainment sector. So, we need to help young people understand the true nature, forget the pesky definitions, just the true nature and potential of green-skilling opportunities, and then make these opportunities available to them in a way that's accessible and flexible, not just these rigid and expensive four-year degree program. Now, the final claim. Education itself needs to be protected from climate change. I struggle with this because I don't want to end on a downer, so hopefully I can lift you up back in a few minutes; but the truth is that in the last two and a half years, more than 400 million students experience significant school closures because of extreme climate. Things like high temperatures or flooding that are only going to become more frequent in the years to come. An affected child in a low-income country lost about 18 days of school because of extreme climate. In a high-income country, they lost two and a half days. Now, 18 days of lost school are a lot of days. It is the number of days it takes a second grader to learn two-digit addition with carry over. Now, some people may think it's not a big deal. They can study at home, they can catch up when they come back; but we know, we know from COVID that they don't catch up, especially poor children. Once they miss critical material because their school shut down, they struggle to follow what's happening in the class. And teachers have so much material to cover that they cannot afford to pause and wait for everyone to catch up. So, these students fall further and further behind till they fail or drop out. Can you imagine trying to solve fractions if you don't fully understand two-digit addition with carry-over? See, even when schools are open, many students are struggling to learn because of high temperatures. So, one of the most aggravating and annoying things about this problem is that it's super consequential. It's going to really affect the future of millions of children for whom education may be their only lifeline; but it is also quite solvable. We know a lot about how to protect education system from climate change. And yet no one is paying attention. So, practically no low or middle or even high-income country is systematically tracking how often schools are shutting down because of climate change. We spoke to more than 100 education policymakers across 33 countries, and nearly half of them don't believe that high temperatures inhibit learning. So, what's the solution? Basically, governments must understand that are things they can do, practical, doable things they can do now, both to harness education more for climate, and to protect education from climate change. And we lay these out in the report; but the bottom line is that it's going to take money. So, we estimate that by a one-time investment of about 18.50 dollars per student, governments can do a lot to protect their learning from a changing climate. But where will this money come from? As it is, many governments are underspending on education. Low-income countries spend on average about 52 dollars per child per year on education, whereas high income countries spend 8,400 dollars per child per year. At the same time, since 2021, billions of dollars have been spent on climate action, and only 1.5% of that money came to the education sector. So, we must change this. We must prioritize education for climate and choose our future. Thank you.
[Dani Clark] Thank you, Shwetlena. I want to remind anybody watching online to please comment, post a question for the Q&A. And now, I'd like to invite our panel to the stage. Andrew Jack is going to moderate. You can all take a seat now. Yes. I also want to note that one of our panelists, we are so pleased to have her here today, the President, as of today, I believe, of the Center for Global Development, Rachel Glennerster. You may have to slip out early, I heard. So, no worries on that front. We're happy to have you. Take it away, Andrew. Over to you.
[Andrew Jack] Great. So, thanks very much. Welcome, everyone. Good morning, everyone here, and afternoon or evening to others watching around the world. I write about education for the Financial Times. I also oversee a couple of projects, one which is offering free access to our content to high schools, another which is talking about education at university level. And two things come out of that for me. One is the challenge of defining what and how we define climate-related issues that I think are so fundamental and we're discussing today, and the other thing is the trade-offs and how to squeeze in content around these issues into very overpacked school timetables and agendas and pressures from policymakers and regulators and administrators and so on, and others. Those are a couple of the key issues we're going to discuss this morning based around this really interesting report, of which I think one of the most original aspects is not purely the content of sustainability education, but also that interaction with the physical infrastructure of schools themselves. And as we were just hearing from Shwetlena, that tension and that potential to increase learning loss. There are some really important issues. We're going to discuss that with our excellent panel here over the next hour, and I think hopefully for the last 15 minutes or so, very keen to hear your views. So do, those of you online, by all means, post. We'll try to distill some of those and bring them into the conversation, and equally, I'll turn to you here who are in the hall. Thanks for attending. But let's begin, maybe. Let me begin, perhaps, with you, Gaurab, you are Director of Education and Policy at the Harvard Chan School, and we're going to talk a little bit about this whole question of that connection between understanding of climate education and action, and also perhaps the trade-off between understanding landing in climate anxiety. So, what's your reading of how fundamental those connections are? What change can be brought about and what the limitations are, really, of that?
[Gaurab Basu] Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, and Andrew, really important question. I think the framing that Elizabeth and Shwetlena and Mamta have given us today are really spot on. Maybe I'll start the conversation by saying it's a choice not to educate people about climate change, too. So, if we are not giving people this education, that is an active decision. I would argue an unfair one and an unethical one to have people not understand. The report also touches upon gaps of knowledge and awareness. But as I think has been framed well today, this is not just about...As educators, we believe in education, awareness, knowledge, inherently in and of itself, and that is important; but when done right, I think, and this is much of my work is in educating health professionals, and what's really important to me in my educational design for programming is that we're not only offering, “Here's what a greenhouse gas emission is, here's how it impacts health,” but that we are introducing these key skills of criticality, of curiosity, of helping people understand how to find their voice in this work. So, the thing I'm most interested in, and the thing I probably studied most in this educational work in climate change is self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is this belief that when you see big problems, you can do something about it. I think that climate change, again, is not just an educational vehicle for learning about this crisis, but it's an opportunity to engage our youth about who they want to be, what voice they want to have in the world that they're building, and what roles they can play. If done right, we are offering our youth an opportunity to understand how they can contribute to the solutions. And the studies that we've done in my work have shown pretty extraordinary increases in that pro-climate behavior, pro-engagement work. So, I think it's a profound lever for us to be able to make pro-climate action into the future.[Andrew Jack]I'm just coming back for a second. One thing I was quite intrigued about in the report is this, and you've got, I have it online, your versions of this, but there's one here showing those with more education show greater concern about climate change; but of course, that can be a double-edged sword, can't it?I mean, it could lead to anxiety without a feeling of capacity to be that agency.
[Gaurab Basu] Sorry, I left off on that. And I think that's actually one of the most important It's clear I don't think I have to tell this audience, everyone in this room is here because we are concerned about climate change. The other part of understanding the impacts of eco-anxiety is that it can be very paralyzing. Climate change feels very big. It feels very overwhelming. We all see the headlines, and frankly, it's impacting the Global South the most. Shwetlena had a profound example of this young person worrying about their future as they're going sleep. This is where I think self-efficacy is so critical, again, is that we make it proximal to people. The hard thing about climate change is that it's an everything issue. It impacts every part of our society. But the opportunity of climate change is it's an everything issue, and everyone can have a role in contributing. And so, I think climate education, when done right, allows people to feel it proximally, understand they actually have a lot to contribute. And we have studied that that is a real mitigator of the anxiety and mental health crisis that's coming out of climate change as well.
[Andrew Jack] So let me turn to Rachel Glennerster now. Rachel, distinguished career in many different areas, a lot of focus on education. Just started now here in Washington with the Center for Global Development. And you've done a lot of work in the last few years about the whole question of foundational learning, as we were hearing earlier, and basic literacy and numeracy, amongst other things, being missing for so many children around the world. So, how to make that balance, that trade-off between prioritizing some of those basic skills and thinking about some of these areas that are coming to the fore as we're discussing today around climate.
[Rachel Glennerster] Yeah, thanks. I don't see it as a trade-off, actually. I mean, Shwetlena was clear about the importance of foundational learning in being able to grasp some of the more complicated concepts and understand the data and what's happening in the world; but I think it's also really important for adaptation. So, for example, there's good evidence that one of the key things we need to do for adaptation in low and middle-income countries is change how we grow crops and adapt to new technologies that can help us with climate change. So, take on new seeds that are climate resistant. There's a lot of evidence that people who have that basic literacy and numeracy are more likely to adapt new technologies faster, and in particular, that they are more likely to buy and use better and improved crops, which is absolutely essential. I've been doing quite a lot of work recently on how much people are going to have to change what they grow and how they grow it in low and middle-income countries, and the faster...And we've done that over the centuries in many countries, but this is going to have to happen really fast. And basic literacy and numeracy are absolutely key in helping people make that transition.
[Andrew Jack] And so, let's say basic climate education should be integrated, let's say, into maths, for example, or basic literacy.
[Rachel Glennerster] Or just knowing...I mean, it just increases the need to be able to do basic math and literacy. So, I'm not even saying...Even if you don't do complicated, “this is how climate change is working,”just enabling children to learn basic math and numeracy, even if you don't even introduce the concept of climate change, I'm not saying avoid it. I'm just saying that's not even needed. If you can read and understand and notice that this farmer’s crops are doing better or I'm doing better if I plant this way, I'm going to be able to adapt much faster to climate change. And that adaptation is we're going to have to adapt what we do much faster. And we really need education to be able to do that.
[Andrew Jack] Gaurab, what's your sense about that integration of climate into some of these broader foundational skills? Have you seen some good best practices?
[Gaurab Basu] Well, again, a lot of my work is in medical schools, which there's a lot packed in there, and there can be this resistance. Well, there's so much else we have to learn. Again, I'll maybe emphasize the point in climate change. It offers this vehicle in which we can do those foundational works. So, I think our model has been in the ways that we've taught it, is to integrate it into those key learning points of the thing that that class session was trying to teach anyway. Climate change offers an opportunity for science lessons. It offers opportunities to learn math, to learn history, to learn social studies, to learn storytelling and the books, the stories that we're telling about in social sciences should be incorporating, I think, our climate stories, environmental impacts much more. What I feel confident about is that we can integrate climate education with the important point here that there is a lot to learn, and it just saying you got to do this also is not going to work. If we're thoughtful about the design, and this is some of the approaches we've tried to take of integration and some of the curriculum I've built, is that this is going to help you do the thing you were trying to learn anyway, and it becomes case studies and vehicles for that deeper learning. So, I think it's a real opportunity here. And what we have found it doesn't displace how they're learning.
[Andrew Jack] So, let's go a little bit from those dealing very much with the youth perspective. Maybe turn to Lupi Quinteros-Grady, President of the Latin American Youth Center. So, Lupi, give us a sense of that extent of climate anxiety and the importance that young people are feeling around climate?
[Lupi Quinteros-Grady] The research has brought on in regarding the level of anxiety, the mix of emotions, anger, at the same time, hope, and at the same time, willingness to take action if they know how. So, for us, it's interesting. We have found ourselves just in spaces where we're trying to make this issue relevant to our young people in a sense that they can figure out how to take actions or career paths. I think that we have specifically a program that is for...We have some of our conservation corps right here in the front, that it's for young people that are engaging back into education. And at the same time, they are part of a cohort of 20 other youth, and they get an opportunity to really go out in the field and actually take action with different partnerships from national parks to local, and take an action in the community. So, it's been really awesome at that start of this, which was almost, I think, I've lost count 10 years ago. We would hear this green jobs, green jobs for LAYC. We're like, “What does that mean?” And I appreciate the report of, “Some stuff’s fancy, let's just get to the basics.” And for us, and for me personally, when we went for funding to try to introduce this work at LAYC and Freeing People, I remember our grant writers feeling very intimidated and saying, “We don't know this work. Why would we? This is out of our...We do youth development, but this is different. ”I'm like, “No, this is part of the work.” And this is part of, for me, the report. One of the things that resonated was in regarding to the young people actually impacting the family, the parents to listen to their children. And so, for that introduction, we had part of our orientation. Of course, we bring in a panel, and we provide different...Just the exposure of what people do in this field. I remember for our young people, they met a ranger that was from Nicaragua, and they were really tripping out that that was the first Latino...They're like, “People do this work, and they take care of our parks.” It was all...It's new. Our orientation, we discussed just the detail of they have weekend trips where they will go out and spend out in nature. That's also in the city here, young people don't get to go outside of the neighborhood. So, to take them out and even be in community and understand how to be good stewards and introduce all of that language, it's really amazing to see just that shift in that care that's there and the desire to advocate once they understand better how they're being empowered to understand the issues. So, the exposure, the relevance, it's challenging, and I think a lot of things were addressed in regarding to the pandemic. We've made progress in a lot of ways, but a lot in our communities, we're still struggling for very basic, like food insecurity is still a top issue. Of course, safety. We have mental health, all of these things. When you discuss this topic, it just seems like very, at times, far away from what's really a very, very pressing issue. And so, introducing the topic in a way that's relevant, exposure to careers, introducing the literacy, the what are we saying? It's what I've seen, really…We've done also programs where it's second nature with the younger population, and it's with the national parks. This was in 2010.And again, they reached out and it was also just they don't see diversity. Who's visiting the parks? Who's engaging in the community and understanding that they're part of this ecosystem?
[Andrew Jack] You raised interesting points there, Lupi, about that connection to work and green skills and so on. Let's explore that a bit more. Maybe perhaps I can turn to you, Kevin, from Generation Unlimited. So, give us your sense of that. How do we move from awareness or even anxiety to action, and indeed, potentially to skill development and career opportunities? What are you seeing around that?
[Kevin Frey] Great. Thank you .I think that's a key question. I want to build on actually everything that's been said already. I think education can happen through climate action. I think it's one of the great ways to educate young people outside of the classroom, learning by doing. Since the start of this year, we have an initiative called the “Green Rising.” We have over 10 million young people in 30 countries taking climate action. What does that mean? It means working in teams, getting out, can confronting a nasty, an intractable, a tough real-world problem, having to work together, communicate, solve problems, think critically, and actually drive an initiative forward. Many of the foundational skills that young people are going to need, no matter what they confront. And what does it do? It helps with this eco-anxiety because they're out there making an actual difference in their community, whether that's a last mile village in sub-Saharan Africa or whether we could walk outside today and everyone in this room could come up with a climate initiative that we could drive forward. So, the next question, and this would tie all the way back to how Mamta set us up, I think, at the start, is that there are competing priorities. The majority of countries have very tight budgets. So why should they invest in green education, in green skills, ultimately? And I'm Canadian, so sorry, you're going to have to live with a hockey analogy. I really apologize, it's very stereotypical. But some of you may have heard, the greatest hockey player, forget the greatest Canadian, but maybe no one other than Canada, Canadians are crazy enough to play this, is a guy called Wayne Gretzky. He's tiny, skinny, not strong, not very fast. He set every record ever in the history of the sport. There was this great interviewer sat down and said, “Wayne, why are you the greatest player to ever play the sport?” And he gave this super simple answer, and he just said, “Well, I skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is.” And if you think about where we're going, the future is green. We saw an extraordinarily powerful statistic today, 100 million new jobs. If you're going to sit with a Minister of Finance, with a Prime Minister, with a Minister of Education and say, why should you invest in green education in climate action, it's because that's where the puck is going. There's a hundred million...You tell me another sector globally that's going to create a hundred million new jobs in the years to come. I don't think there's a stronger investment case as governments start to weigh off priorities. Maybe one final comment on jobs. I think a lot of the time, we always think about jobs as employees. There are extraordinary opportunities in the entrepreneurial space, in green space. We're incubating young entrepreneurs around the world who are both motivated and not only looking for jobs, but creating jobs by creating new green ventures to grow their local economy. So, I think we have to keep green entrepreneurship in the discussion, as well as looking at the different sectors that we can start to create career paths for young people.
[Andrew Jack] Lupi, you already mentioned that idea of making it real through students seeing ranges and so on. How much is your sense, is there an aspiration by young people in school to go into green jobs? Yeah. Lupi.
[Lupi Quinteros-Grady] You got to look at it. I think that a lot of times what we're trying to do is bridge a lot of the skills and the gaps that are there in the learning. We find ourselves running into obstacles in our young people that there's assessments in order to go into certain skills. And so, we run into the issue of... There's certain corporations or institutions that we've been trying to create pipelines and have passed some challenges in regarding how they do the assessments. If you talk about policy, what are you talking about? There has to be a way to not make it so difficult because we have a...There is the interest, it's the skills that we have to bridge. And that's been for our out-of-school population that we see now. For in school, that's different. And so, there's the opportunity there to continue to be a bridge to those opportunities. And so that's there. But I don't always see that easy road or that real connection in regarding to how a lot of times our communities can be connected to these opportunities easily because of the type of assessments and sometimes the skills that are needed.
[Andrew Jack] So, Kevin, going back to your hockey analogy, thinking about following the puck and where it's going. What about this relationship between developing the skills and having the green jobs that align with them? What needs to come first, and is there a way to drive from skills to create those green jobs?
[Kevin Frey]I think it's a highly localized answer. I think country by country, you have to look at the industries and economies that exist there and that governments want to drive forward and make concerted investments over significant time periods to both create the economies, but then the workforce so that they'll have that supply and demand to match. This is It's a non-trivial exercise, and it's a big bet from government. But you see governments around the world picking green sectors and deciding that their country will lead here. So, I do think we need some big bets from governments in the space. That said, and I'll come back to entrepreneurship, every young person can start a business. Even if it's a small cottage industry in a last mile village. I'll give you a quick example. A guy called Calvin Shikuku, who I know very well, lives in the most dangerous slum area in Kenya. He started himself just collecting organic waste and turning it into bio- briquettes. So, he'd go house to house to house and get this, and then turn it into a safer fuel. We invested 5,000 dollars in his idea, gave him a little bit of incubation. He now has 60 employees who are just collecting organic waste in this Kenyan slum, turning it into bio- briquettes. So, you're talking about job creation opportunities across the board. I think governments need to make big bets on sectors to match supply and demand going forward; but then I think every young person can look for those opportunities to actually create their own businesses as well.
[Andrew Jack] So let me turn now to Liesbet Steer, and you've done work Liesbet, you've worked for a long time in education at different levels. You're very focused on this whole question now of skills. So, what's your sense about what skills could be nurtured, are required, and how far governments and others are incentivizing the importance and the development of those?
[Liesbet Steer] Great. Thank you. This is a fantastic report, by the way, Shwetlena and the team. Amazing. I'm also equally pleased that there's so many young people in this room; but I actually would like to say it's not just about the young people, it's a whole of society effort. Sometimes I feel when we say education, we are talking about a segment of society, young people, people in the education systems, and what we actually need is a massive reskilling and upskilling effort that touches every single person in society. I spent the last month in two countries, Mozambique and South Africa, and I'd like to mention a couple of examples of what I saw there, which brings this to life. South Africa is one of these countries that really pledged to accelerate its progress towards green transition and its NDCs. It's the 13th largest carbon emitter, and 40% of that comes from electricity, which is mainly coming from coal. In Glasgow, at the COP, it said, “We want to go much faster.” And the world came behind South Africa and pledged a lot of finance for this transition. So, South Africa set on this road, and what we find is a few years later, that progress has been very slow. One of the most important factors for this is that there was no plan for the skilling and reskilling of people. I visited one of the big power plants there called Komati Power Plant, and you could see that there was no plan, and everything came to a halt. There were no providers for education, no upskilling, no reskilling. In the next few years, 300,000 people and jobs will be created because of the green transition. It's estimated that with an unemployment rate of 35% currently in South Africa, that most of these skills will need to be imported from different countries. So here you have a country that is set on this path, that had the backing and the finances. It couldn't do it, and everything has slowed down because of that. Another example is Mozambique. It's a totally different situation. I spent some time in Gorongosa National Park. Beautiful. One of the largest parks, most important national parks in Africa, important for restoration and restoring of nature, important for, of course, our climate goals. Again, the same story. This conservation effort, in this case, actually has been very successful because of an entirely new vision for conservation, which was that instead of building fences and setting a team of park rangers in the park and keeping people out, the government, as well as some philanthropists, and one of the very wonderful philanthropists called Greg Carr, decided that what they needed to do was actually invest in what they call the special economic zone around it, which is the people zone. Remarkably, for a philanthropic effort that's about conservation or climate, most of the investments actually went into skilling and educating people. And so, this is now seen as one of the most successful biodiversity efforts in the world. Every scientist is coming to see what's happened there; but the story about this investment in people and this investment in people and this investment in skilling, education, training, everything that you can think about has not been told. I think the report sets out some incredible recommendations which I think we all should take, read, and in detail focus on. But I'd say for me, sitting where I'm sitting now, which is actually in the climate community, there are a few that stand out. One is that we need a narrative, a much better narrative around the role of skills in the climate transition. I actually went, and I'm an economist, and I thought, “Let's go and see my and see what they've got to say.” And what you find, actually, is that in the economics literature, there's not a consistent view at the moment around the role of education and skills for growth. I'm looking at my colleagues here in the education sector because the Bank has done some interesting work. But Ricardo Hausmann, who is now leading the Harvard Growth Lab, essentially has written an article saying, the myth of education, which essentially states that education is not leading to economic growth or inclusive growth. And one of the points he's making is actually consistent with this whole of society effort is that it's about skills. Education is part of skilling, but skilling can also happen outside education systems, as Kevin was saying, in training, in on-the-job training, and we haven't been able to capture that. And I think the report also, Shwetlena, says this, that actually all these opportunities that exist outside education systems may well be more important for green skilling than the education system itself. So that's something to think of. But thinking about this relationship between skills, not education, but skills, and the green transition is important. Secondly, you said it about the industrial strategies, we need to get inside the industrial strategies of countries. Less than 40% of all the NDCs do not include skills. And then we need to think in a whole new way about what it means to skill people. We have, on the one hand, quite outdated technical vocational systems that are part of the education system. On the other hand, we have thousands of initiatives by the private sector that are very fragmented. And we're not bridging, talking about the bridge, we need to bridge this because we need to scale at scale, and we need to change the systems in order to do that in a way that's demand-driven. And of course, all of this will need the finances. And here I would make a big plug for, we talk a lot about the public finance. Important countries at the moment, talk to Jeff Sachs. He's done a lot of analysis on this. Many countries simply do not have the money to fund their education. We need to think about different ways of doing this. Private sector finance, World Bank, that's public, but in a way, borrowing for education. Yes, we should borrow for education. If the returns are so high, the Bank and other banks have a big role to play. Thank you.
[Andrew Jack] We'll come back to finance; but, Rachel, maybe shifting also to the other part of this report, thinking about the learning loss from, as we were hearing from Shwetlena, flooding, extreme heat, and so on, the effects on actual learning, school absences or ability to concentrate, and so on. It doesn't seem to have entered so much into the debate up till now. What's your sense of it? Has this been a missing element?
[Rachel Glennerster] Yeah, I think people got a little bit of a wake-up call in COVID or after COVID, unfortunately, because as we heard, there's huge...There's this automatic reaction of something's going wrong, close the schools, protect children. And really, a failure to recognize how important and damaging that action is. And the same thing is happening with climate. The Center for Global Development has done some work on looking at different shocks around the world, and floods, earthquakes, etcetera. And all too often, the response is just close the schools. And yet, there is a lot of evidence about long term impact of that in terms of lost wages, lost productivity. So, I think we're all, those of us who had children during the pandemic, very well aware of the immediate impact. But what's really scary is there's good studies that show that that impact goes on for years. There's some work, really interesting work in Argentina that looked at teacher strikes that happened in different parts of the country at different times for different lengths of time. The children who suffered from closed schools during that time in their 30s and 40s had lower wages, like 2% to 3% lower wages. So the catch up is, unfortunately, very uncertain. And again, earthquakes in Pakistan, people went four years later. And the children who were close to the epicenter of the earthquake were behind by several years. Interestingly, the Pakistan example gives us some hope about what to do about it, because I think that's a really important thing where we don't have a lot of hope. We don't have a lot of solutions. We're telling governments, don't close the schools as the first thing. But if you just had a massive flood, I worked on the floods in Pakistan recently, and there wasn't an awful lot of choice. So, what do you do after the event to get people back on track? Well, one of the things you can do is catch up classes because what we learned from the Pakistan earthquake example is some of the learning loss happened at the time, but a lot of the learning loss happened because children fell below the curriculum, and the curriculum just marched on. And they were behind and so they fell more, and more behind over those four years. So, what can we do? We can do special interventions, special catch-up classes to get children back up to where they need to be. That's quite effective. People have started looking at doing mobile phone interventions, lessons over mobile phones during the time when the schools are closed. But I think we're really early on in our learning about what we can do for the inevitable school closures that are coming. First, don't automatically go to closing schools when there's any choice, but we need more options for how to get children back on track when the inevitable closures happen. And this really needs to be a lot of work, a lot of idea. We need a ton more ideas about what to do about this. You know, heat in schools, you get one degree higher temperature and people learn 1% less. And that's way higher if you're talking about high temperatures. What do we do? There's evidence showing that if you put air conditioning in schools, the learning loss is much less. Well, great, but I mean, most of the schools that I work with, there's no way they're getting air conditioning in the short term. But people have experimented with things like if you paint the roof white, how much does that reduce the temperature? So, we need a lot more creative ideas about how to solve this.
[Andrew Jack] I guess the paradox, isn't it? Is though the event, pandemic, or indeed, even heat and school closure is dramatic and immediate, the consequences are very long term, and therefore, quite difficult for policymakers to integrate and see the impact, positive or negative.
[Rachel Glennerster] Yeah. I think that's why we saw this in COVID. People were worrying about the immediate idea death toll, and they weren't thinking about, these children are going to have worse outcomes. We're seeing a mental health epidemic in children who went through all of that cutting off of social connections during the pandemic. So, yeah, they're thinking about the immediate, and they're not thinking about the long term. Partly it's about educating people about that these have long term impacts; but I found that policymakers are much more likely to respond to evidence if you give them an option of what to do about it. If you tell them, “Oh, it's a complete disaster, you shouldn't close schools,” they're like, “Oh, but what do I do?” But if you say, “No, but here's what you do in terms of catch up. Here's how you can paint the roof white.” I don't know about the roof white, by the way. That's an idea that people have. They’re starting to test it. They're starting to test air purifiers because air quality is also really bad when the heat is bad, and again, it leads to learning loss. So, we need to offer solutions, and then policymakers are more likely to respond.
[Andrew Jack] So, let's just think a little bit about, after we're here at the World Bank, the finance issues. Liesbet raised this earlier. I'll come back to you in a sec, but Rachel, what's your sense about how really to mobilize governments? As you say, particularly low-income settings, very resource constrained. They can't afford air conditioning, possibly even not white paint, if it works. So, how do you really crystallize that argument and find the resources given all those other priorities they face?
[Rachel Glennerster] I think making the argument about cost effectiveness is...I mean, I'm an economist, so that's what we tend to go to, but it does help win the argument about you get a high return from this. And also that you're not asking for the world. You're not asking for a laptop for every child. You're saying, “Let's do something where we send messages over mobile phones while schools are closed.”A good recent study in Bangladesh that showed big scale, quite cheap, big returns. So, offer them some...And that is then what education leaders can take to ministries of finance and say, “Here's a practical thing, it's been tested. It's not too expensive.” That's how I make the case.
[Andrew Jack] And Liesbet, you've worked not only at government level, but also, as it were between governments, for example, your work at the Education Commission on new models of financing. What's your sense about ways forward to try and identify and prioritize the financing that's required by governments, local authorities, to invest both in climate education and mitigation, for example, as we've heard for schools themselves?
[Liesbet Steer] Well, I think, to second what Rachel was saying about the rates of return and making the case to governments that investing in this is really important for economic and green growth. At the moment, there's been a, “Yes, we believe in this,” but when it comes down to designing a green growth strategy, it's not been there. I look at a number of reports, including the South Africa Big Green Growth Plan. There's no real talk about how skills fit into that. So, we need to get much smarter as an education community to put ourselves at the heart of these arguments that are being made by other sectors about the importance of green growth and education within that. Our sector has very much focused on public finance, which is obviously in many cases very important. When you to talk about skilling, and also whole of society skilling for the green transition, we need to start talking much more about private finance. It's remarkable when we look at most of the UN reports about education financing, there is no talk about the role of private finance. In our sector, I think we are not helping ourselves by, to some extent, not fully including the whole of society, including the private sector, whether that's for financing, whether that's for determining where the jobs will come from, engaging the private sector in design of curricula in terms of determining what skills are needed. All those connections are currently not being made. And that has led to Rachel's work on best buys and bad buys, essentially saying that investing in skilling in TVET is a bad buy, and someone actually should tell you, Rachel, I was quoted that by the High Commission in South Africa. And the reason for that is we haven't yet designed the cost-effective and effective skilling interventions that will make a difference, and we must do that really fast because otherwise, people are indeed saying, “We're not putting our money into that, it's a bad buy.” So, making the case for what good interventions are and thinking much more creatively outside of public finance. And also, as I said, looking at not just tax revenues, but also other instruments like lending from the banks, which is, again, something the education sector has felt uncomfortable about. Why should we borrow for education? It's a recurrent cost. We can't possibly do that. It's an investment. And that is what we need to get across in our narrative.
[Andrew Jack] There's Rachel very briefly coming back on that. But yes, how do we turn TVET, Technical Vocational Education and Training, from a bad buy to a good buy?
[Rachel Glennerster] Yeah. I agree that we need to innovate and design better TVET. And interestingly, there are now some good examples of some innovative new ways of doing training programs that are seeing a return. And my challenge when I was working at the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office in the UK was seeing this emerging evidence that there were examples of how to do skills training that were good, but I couldn't yet be clear in saying, these are the five things you need to include to make sure your one is a good one. All the people out there working on skills training, that's what we need. [Andrew Jack] Lack of evidence. You need more evidence. [Rachel Glennerster] Lack of evidence about what...So, there's evidence about that some things work and a whole lot of things don't work. What we need to understand is what are the key things that allow me as a funder to distinguish between is this a good one or a bad one? Because I can't do that yet. That I can't look at the literature and the evidence and say, this is the thing that made this work and these hundred not work. And so that's what we need before we pour. And that's what...I'm ex-Ministry of Finance, right? That's what I would need before I would say, sign off on a big check to do this at big scale.
[Andrew Jack] One note. Yeah, please go. You're good.
[Gaurab Basu] I want to just make one point about the health benefits of addressing this of education. So, when I organize my thoughts about these trajectories, I think we're all describing these impacts have lifelong impacts. When schools are closed and all that, I organized my thoughts thinking about an organization I've worked with for a long time called the Child and Need Institute, which works in the Sundaran's area near the Bay of Bengal and West Bengal. And so, I think we haven't talked about is sometimes these climate shocks, they're mostly through cyclones, can not only close schools, but kids can leave school. A life cycle approach that the Child and Need Institute takes says that we are working painstakingly to keep kids in schools. These climate shocks happen. Economic devastation occurs. Families need to pull kids out of school to help recover. The things I've worked with them are the impacts of that on early marriage, early pregnancy, women empowerment. There’s just…You picture a child's life from 10 to 25. It's important for us to understand that these shocks, and again, these areas of Bangladesh, West Bengal, all these places around the world we're talking about are the front lines of recurrent shocks. So, this happens, and it could change, maybe they recover once, it happens again, and they just have to get pulled out of school. I just want to make the argument of ensuring economic recovery in a way in which the children are allowed to stay in school, help the parents recover without having to pull the kids out of school, pays big dividends in their education, their health outcomes. I mean, education is one of the best markers we can have of health benefits, and especially for reproductive health benefits. So, the importance of catching that moment and allowing the recovery to happen appropriately has so many implications, not only for those educational outcomes, but for the health outcomes as well.
[Andrew Jack] Yeah, it's important to multiply effects. You're talking about that. So, we're running a bit short of time. So, I want now to open it up to our audience to see if you've got any questions. Obviously, you have. That's great. So, yeah, should we start, I think, at the front here? Maybe she can start first.
[Dani Clark] Sure. I'm going to bring the mic around. [Andrew Jack] Please keep the questions brief so we have time to answer because we've already got about 15 minutes.
[Audience member 1] Hi, everyone. My name is [inaudible], and I'm one of the full writers from Pakistan, and I'm a George Washington University student. I have a question, and then some of the things which I really want to share. I'm from the northern areas of Pakistan, which is readily affected by heavy rain, heavy floodings. And this is generally considered as the third Pole because there is the heavy snow and the glaciers which melt every year, and then from northern area as it goes to the whole Southern region and flooding throughout Pakistan. So before coming here, I was working with one of the NGOs, and we went to one of the villages over there, one of the children who was in third grade, she mentioned that she feels sad and she feels low just because all of her classmates, they have left the place, and she have no one to play with. And she has to spend all the time with her grandparents or parents, and they are also busy with their own work, and they don't give time to me. I always feel bad because everybody is leaving this place. I don't know why they are doing that. And then in another region, about four years ago, one of the agencies said that this region is on high alert. “You guys have to move from here.” But people were really resilient, and they were saying, “We are not going to move from this place because we know we have a huge faith that nothing is going to happen. ”But last year, it was a huge glacier which came there, and a lot of infants were also there. So, in a region like this, how can we make a change? That is the question which I have.[Andrew Jack]Okay, thanks. Anyone want to have a go? Anyone on our panel? Rachel, yeah.
[Rachel Glennerster] Yeah, I did some work on the flooding in Pakistan, actually, on the impact on health and immunization, and found…Well, again, these long-term effects that children missed vaccination despite the attempts. I don't know. So just one thing that people have found is that providing information about when the shocks are coming, now you said in this situation, people didn't respond. But in general, it's amazing how resourceful people are. If they know in advance that something is happening, they will move the livestock to higher ground. They will plant different crops if they know the weather is going to be different. So, I think trusting people and making sure that we, rather than just centrally planning everything, but getting the information out to people of everything that we know, there is actually quite a lot of evidence that people can make sensible decisions. And also, rather than give humanitarian aid afterwards, give people money before. You know something is happening. You know it's going to be a bad flood season. You know the hurricanes coming. Send people money now, and they will figure out way better than aid agencies how to preserve.
[Andrew Jack] Okay. Let me take two or three others together, please. We'll be a bit briefly, perhaps, behind you there, please. Yeah.
[Audience member 2] Thank you for all. During the entire thing, I've been hearing about climate action within boundaries because all the examples have been about a particular country. But all the third-world countries are extractive landscapes that have history behind for what they are. I would love to hear about your thoughts on how first-world countries that have caused issues in these third-world countries, can [they] be more helpful, more responsible? Not every country is going to have a Ministry where they are going to put that investment in that's going to trickle down to people that's needed. So, what about the role of bigger nations that do have funds to redo or correct their past?
[Andrew Jack] Okay, thanks. Can we have a couple over this way. Yes, please.
[Audience member 3] Hello, good morning, everyone. My name is [inaudible].I'm speaking from the perspective of Nigeria, which is an oil-producing country. We have areas in Nigeria, such as the Middle Belt, which produces oil, and they suffer mostly a lot from climate change and the effects of oil extraction. In those same areas, you have people who also covet oil and gas jobs. Oil and gas jobs are very much desirable in Nigeria. It's seen as a job that gets you a lot of money. It's crazy to me how in the areas that are suffering from the effects of these oil and gas companies, they still want those jobs. Those jobs are still desirable. Now we've had the boom of tech. Tech is a huge thing in Nigeria. Everyone is looking towards tech to make money. And in areas where people are poor, they're suffering, they're disproportionately affected by climate change, how can we make green jobs desirable for them? How do we explain to them through this education that what is affecting you, what's affecting your family is the thing you're desiring? Thank you.
[Andrew Jack] Kevin, do you want to go on that one? [Kevin Frey] Very quickly, in some ways, I think you answered your question perfectly. We have to make sure that young people know they can make money from green jobs. This idea that somehow, it's philanthropic or voluntary work to work green. No, these are real jobs. And I would say there's a triple bottom line as well. For young people, not only are they creating livelihoods for themselves when they go into the green space, they're creating, presumably, they're growing the economies, their communities, donating tax revenue to build their national economies, and making the planet better at the same time. I think what we need to persuade...I think if it's a matter of not making any money and just doing planet work versus taking a job in the oil and gas sector, most people are going to go oil and gas. So, we have to be real here. We have to make economic arguments that appeal to young people and talk about that triple bottom line. Maybe there is a bit of a trade-off. Maybe you make a little bit less in the green economy to get started, but that's okay because of what you're doing to help the planet. But it comes down to money.
[Andrew Jack] Liesbet. [Liesbet Steer] I think the report actually sets out that actually there are premiums on green jobs increasingly because green jobs, there's a scarcity, and that's what is going to hold the climate community. And they have not yet figured out that this is going to increase the cost of climate action, hugely. No one has estimated the cost of premiums on the wages and on the cost of slowing the transition to the big climate models. I also wanted to answer actually the question about the compensation. I think there's been a lot of discussion in the climate community around compensation. There was a big loss and damage fund agreed. I think it was at COP27 in Egypt, and then there was, again, the contributions to it at the Dubai COP or the UAE COP.I think the issue in my mind is not so much about, is there going to be money on the table? It is what that money is going to be spent on. And is the climate community, when it puts forward its money, is it going to think about infrastructure, about technology, or about people? And that piece of it, I think, is our big battle to fight, because at the moment, most of the conversations I have with climate people is when I mention the word education or skilling, they say, “That's not our job, that's the education sector.” And so that, I think, when we talk about compensation, really guiding people into investing in skills. And as you were saying earlier about what do you do in terms of protection? Is it when you have agriculture, when people want to be resilient against floods, what agriculture is needed? I saw this in Gorongosa as well. At the moment, people are at slash and burn agriculture. Take down the forest and plant very cheap crops or very low value crops. You need to give people the education to plant different types of crops, coffee, honey, that's what they're working on. The value increases. It's better for the environment. And when the trees stay in place, it also protects against landslides, floods, and all these things.
[Andrew Jack]Okay, I'm trying to get a few more in. Yeah, the one over there.
[Dani Clark]And I also have an online question to add.[Andrew Jack] Okay, yeah. I'll give you the one at the end there, please. Yeah, and give us your online after that, please. That's all right. [Audience member 4 ]Hello, everyone. Thank you for having us on this side. It was indeed a very thought-provoking session throughout. I was trying to catch up with this one particular question to the whole session, that is, all of the report that you guys presented today, it actually says about the facts that how education can play a role in improving climate action, but then how about how are you going to address the inequalities, the systematic inequalities, the resource limitation of those countries? As Gaurab mentioned, that Global South is most affected by climate change. So how are you going to address the systematic inequalities in Global South and the resource limitation of Global South when it comes to climate change? Thank you.
[Andrew Jack] Okay, thanks. Do you want to read your online question as well?
[Dani Clark] Yes. Online, there's a lot of energy around the question of how can we incorporate climate change education into our existing curricula? Like concrete examples of how to teach children.
[Andrew Jack] Okay, and maybe one more here, please, on the front? Yeah
[Akinye] Good morning. Thank you for this insightful panel. My name is Akinye, and I'm originally from Kenya. So currently, I'm, together with some Kenyan partners, running a nonprofit called Tendo. And this is very interesting to me because currently we're educating on better farming practices. We're currently upskilling and reskilling. We teach on more sustainable practices that do bring high yields where we don't have to use harmful pesticides. We started a few years ago, and now we've moved from the city of Nairobi to a village in Western Kenya. It's not just formal education. And so, I appreciate that we're looking at practical solutions, but for example, a country like Kenya, where maybe the priority may not be for the government to fund projects like this, how do we then upskill? Or now that we have a small village, how do we then upskill in terms of financing and partnerships? Because a project like this, for it to have a long-standing impact would require that. So how then can we upskill our reskilling?
[Andrew Jack] Okay. Anybody on the upskilling who would like to come in? Yeah. [Andrew Jack] Yes, please
[Kevin Frey] So, yeah, very quickly, I know we're up against time. I think, so we've got a couple of great partners actually in Kenya, so we'll talk afterwards, doing something very similar and training young “agripreneurs,” we call them, to provide extension services to farmers, to essentially provide that education to farmers. I visited with them. You have a sheet of white paper and a little projector, 10,000 lessons on how to improve your yield area. But what they've managed to do, because of course, we can get the seed funding and we can mobilize a little bit of catalytic funding. But you're right, the real question is sustainability. They've carved out a business model now where each young agripreneur serves 200 farmers, providing a whole bunch of different services, not only education, but actually selling some of those climate smart pesticides, giving them access to markets, aggregating supply demand. So, there's actually a business model there for young people, where not only are they bringing these new regenerative and cyclical approaches to farmers, they're actually creating livelihoods as well. So, we'll talk more.
[Andrew Jack] Okay. And anybody want to come back on the online question around the integration of climate into education best practices? Any examples? Anyone's got?
[Gaurab Basu] I'll just maybe plug the importance of health in the middle of all of that, I think bringing health impacts really allows us to make this very human and proximal to people. I'll just maybe briefly echo what people have said is that the classroom stuff is important. I think people need to understand how the green gas phenomenon happens. But getting out of the classroom and seeing how it's impacting their communities, seeing how pollution, seeing what heat stress really looks like, people have to feel it. We don't want people to just use their brains, but to use their hearts in this work. Again, Christiana Figueres, who ran the Paris COP is a spiritual leader, I feel like, for me. I just love her voice in this, is that climate change makes us grapple with these big, deep questions about who we are, how we built the world, what we've done wrong, frankly, for many, many decades. So, the point of the inequities here, there's no easy answer to it. But climate change is a manifestation of all these things we have to fix. And there's no one solution to that, but I think it's holding the depth of this problem, the hard part of that is you see all the problems. The good news is you do climate solutions with that deep-hearted work, and you see all the solutions just blossom out. And in the health world, we can have a healthier, more just by digging under the Earth and doing that ground-based work, the opportunities for health unleash. I would just make the argument that bringing this into all the work of equity improving in the world allows us to have so much more potency in that.
[Kevin Frey] Just to underscore, because we're doing this in tens of countries right now. It's actually quite simple, “curricularly,” if that's a word. Get young people out of the classroom, ask them to identify a real problem in their community related to climate, and work in teams to solve it. And then the teacher becomes a support, a coach, a coordinator, and let those young people act as agents and actually solve problems in their community. It's powerful stuff. [Andrew Jack] Rachel, did you want to briefly come back on the systemic inequalities issue? A minor topic.
[Rachel Glennerster] Solve systemic inequality in 30 seconds. Yes. I mean, look… It's really hard. Yes, it's absolutely the case that the worst impacts are happening for the poorest because they don't have the air conditioning, they don't have the ways of coping. They're already hot countries. So, my suggestion is that at the moment, we have all our climate money is focused on the country, like all the mitigation climate money is all being spent in that domestic country. We're focused on net zero internally. The IRA is all being spent in the US. Actually, there's incredible opportunities to improve the climate much more cost-effectively outside the US. So, if we could take the trillion dollars that is being spent by the US on climate policies in the US and spread it out around the world a bit more. I'm not talking about aid. Aid is tiny in this. We need to get the actual real size of all climate money that countries are spending, but they're all spending it in their own domestic country. And that's not the most effective way to deal with the climate, and it's not the just way to deal with the climate. Look, politically, that's really hard, but I think that's what we have to do.
[Andrew Jack] Okay. We're almost out of time, formally, although I hope a lot of our panelists could stay to mingle and provide advice as we were just discussing there. So very briefly, 30 seconds a piece, not an elevator test because we're trying to save electricity here. You're going to walk down the staircase with your chosen policymaker or decision maker. Give us the one takeaway, each of you, on really that issue of how to harness education for climate. Lupi.
[Lupi Quinteros-Grady] I think, if anything, this has been very provoking in the skills conversation in regarding to the education in the classroom is great, but I remain with trying to figure out locally in our space, the LAYC, in the context that we have, young people, how to define or how to figure out how to collaborate with who and thinking of employers around their skills and definitions, because there's just still for me a disconnect in regarding to how these pieces are connected and in alignment. [Andrew Jack] A good challenge. Liesbet.
[Liesbet Steer] Join a great initiative of climate actors. That is going to try to make the case for skills for the green economy. And that initiative is coming out of the climate community. So, my big pitch would be, let's not go to the education conferences, go to the climate meetings, and try to understand where the climate community is, where it is going, where it wants to go, and figure out how we can insert ourselves into that.
[Andrew Jack] Okay. Kevin.
[Kevin Frey] The future is green. There's no question about it. There's not a faster growing sector out there. So, every young person thinking about their futures escape to where the puck is going, skill yourself up on green, and think not only about opportunities to work in the formal economy, but also to potentially be an entrepreneur, a “greenpreneur,”and to drive job creation and planetary benefit at the same time.
[Andrew Jack] Yeah, Gaurab.
[Gaurab Basu] I have these two basic beliefs in climate solutions. One is that human beings are actually extraordinary. We're capable of so much, and that we really love children, that we really want to make sure our kids are okay. And education is about knowledge, but it's about helping people find a sense of purpose, find their voice, find their place in all of this. And that's what the promise of education is. And I think we should not underestimate the power of people power and having people unlock their possibilities around the world.
[Andrew Jack] Rachel.
[Rachel Glennerster] So, it's very hard to predict exactly where we're going to be and exactly what skills we're going to need; but what we know we need is flexibility. So, we need education to make us more flexible to be able to adjust to the incredible change that is happening, whether it's new green jobs or whether it's hurricanes. You need that fundamental level of learning that makes people able to adapt to what's ever coming in the future.
[Andrew Jack] Thanks very much, Rachel. The other two things I've come away with is this message of education through action, or indeed, action through education. And also, the building that better narrative of the skills for the green transition. So, thank you all our panelists. Thank you all for coming. And do stay in chat informally.
[Dani Clark] We're going to have a couple of words. Yeah, go ahead, Rachel. A couple of words from Luis Benveniste, who is a Global Director of Education at the World Bank.
[Luis Benveniste] Thank you very much. And thank you for such a hugely rich discussion. I'm still processing all of these words of wisdom and insight. It's been great. If there's one message that we want you to leave home with today is really about how the education and how also Liesbet reminded us skilling is perhaps one of the strongest catalysts for change, for climate action. It's the strongest builder of climate awareness, of those behaviors, of those skills, of those attitudes that are really fundamental to make a difference and to really bring into reality both adaptation and mitigation. We heard about how big the challenge is, what needs to be done, the half of that it's wreaking. But also, we heard words of hope, of what can make a difference, what matters, and ultimately, that we're all agents of change. All of you up here can do and will do something to really bring change into life. For us at the World Bank, what does this mean to us? We are committed to both making a difference to education and climate. We're marrying this agenda of really translating this into our programming, into our portfolio. And there's a wide variety of ways in which we're doing this. In Nigeria, we're supporting government to do a girls' education program to bring climate adaptation into reality. In Bangladesh, we're supporting government to making school infrastructure more resilient to flooding, to cyclones. And in Vietnam, we're supporting universities to do the research necessary for that use of green energy transition into serving a more high-tech agriculture and so on. We're all part of this. We all can make a difference. So again, thank you all for those of you, for the panel, for joining us today. For those of you online and for those of you here for coming over and really making a difference. Thank you.
[Dani Clark] Thank you, everybody. Thank you.
