Climate Change and Sustainability Education

Fernando Reimers’s work on sustainability education grows from a broader commitment to making education relevant to the most consequential challenges facing humanity. He has developed curricula that translate the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals into concrete learning experiences, helping students understand global interdependence and develop the knowledge, ethical commitments, and agency needed to contribute to a more just and sustainable world.

Among these resources is Empowering Global Citizens: A World Course, an interdisciplinary K–12 curriculum developed with colleagues and students at Harvard. The World Course integrates cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal competencies across grade levels, connecting academic learning with human rights, global citizenship, and sustainable development. Other resources—including Empowering Students to Improve the World in Sixty Lessons and Learning to Collaborate for the Global Common Good—provide educators and school leaders with practical approaches for aligning curriculum and teaching with the Sustainable Development Goals. These materials have been translated into multiple languages and used by schools and education systems internationally.

Beyond developing curriculum, Reimers has worked with individual schools, school networks, universities, governments, and international organizations to connect the Sustainable Development Goals with curriculum reform, teacher professional development, educational leadership, and system-wide change. At Harvard he served on the Task Force that developed a Climate Education plan. His advisory work has extended across numerous countries and has included collaborations with UNESCO, UNICEF, the OECD, the World Bank, and other international institutions.

His recent scholarship focuses increasingly on the two-way relationship between education and climate change: how extreme heat, disasters, displacement, and other climate-related pressures disrupt education, and how schools can prepare students and communities to contribute to adaptation, mitigation, resilience, and sustainable transformation. His books Education and Climate Change: The Role of Universities and, with Margaret Wang-Aghania, Educating for a Climate Changed Futureargue that effective climate education requires more than isolated lessons. It calls for coordinated change across curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, teacher preparation, leadership, school infrastructure, governance, and community partnerships. His article Educating Students for Climate Action is an analysis of how universities integrate climate education in their curriculum.