Climate Change and the School: Preparing Students and Schools for a Warming World

Climate Change and the School: What’s Actually Happening, and What Isn’t Being Taught

A contributing voice from school practice | Specialist in curriculum, pedagogy, and school leadership

India’s schools are already experiencing the effects of climate change, and the scale is measurable rather than anecdotal: heatwaves alone affected an estimated 54.8 million Indian children’s schooling in 2024, part of a broader pattern in which extreme weather is estimated to cost Indian students roughly 10% of the academic year. The school system has been slow to respond both as an institution — the country’s original climate action plan didn’t mention education at all — and as an educator, where curriculum reform has added climate content without yet building the practical, experiential learning that makes it stick.

Key facts

• UNICEF estimates that climate shocks disrupted schooling for at least 242 million children globally in 2024, with South Asia the most affected region at 128 million students; heatwaves alone affected 54.8 million children in India.
• India ranks 26th out of 163 countries on UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Index, reflecting high vulnerability to climate-driven education disruption.
• Extreme heat is estimated to be costing Indian students roughly 10% of the academic year in lost instructional time, a figure likely to grow as temperatures rise further.
• 2024 alone saw extended, climate-driven school closures across multiple states: Rajasthan mandated a break from mid-May to end-June; Delhi declared a 50-day summer vacation; Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh both extended holidays; and Meghalaya — a state not traditionally associated with heat risk — closed schools for the first time specifically due to a heatwave in 2023.
• India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change (2008) established eight national missions on climate response — none of which focused on education, a specific, documented institutional gap rather than a general policy failure.
• Academic analysis of NEP 2020 and NCF 2023’s climate-content integration finds that while curricular commitment has genuinely grown, the actual content in NCERT materials “remains content-heavy, limiting critical inquiry and experiential learning” — meaning the curriculum has expanded in scope without necessarily improving in method.

The institution and the curriculum are failing in specific, different ways

A national climate action plan with eight missions and zero for education is not an oversight buried in fine print — it’s a structural signal about where education sat in the country’s climate planning. Meanwhile, a curriculum that has added climate content but stayed “content-heavy” is a second, separate failure: it’s not that schools aren’t teaching climate change, it’s that they may be teaching it in a way unlikely to build the practical understanding the crisis actually requires.

These are two distinct problems worth separating, because they call for different responses. The institutional gap — no dedicated national mission for education within the broader climate response — is a systemic issue largely outside any individual school’s control, though it explains why school-level heat and flood response has often looked improvised (extended holidays announced state by state, reactively) rather than planned. The curricular gap — content-heavy material limiting experiential learning — is more directly addressable at school level: a teacher doesn’t need to wait for national reform to shift a lesson from textbook description toward the field-based, project-based learning that UNICEF’s own India programming explicitly recommends.

Five principles for responding to both halves of this problem

1. Diagnose which specific climate risk your school actually faces. Heat, flooding, cyclones, and air pollution each require different infrastructure and scheduling responses — a coastal Odisha school’s cyclone exposure calls for a different plan than a Delhi school’s air-pollution closures or a Rajasthan school’s heat exposure.
2. Maintain the relational and instructional quality that makes catch-up learning actually work. When disrupted schedules require condensed or make-up instruction, the same relationship-based teaching quality the broader school-improvement research identifies as decisive elsewhere applies directly here — rushed, low-trust catch-up teaching is unlikely to recover genuine learning loss.
3. Push for planned calendar adjustment over reactive closure announcements. Ad hoc, last-minute holiday extensions compound disruption in a way a pre-planned, communicated adjusted calendar does not — consistency in how disruption is handled matters as much as the disruption itself.
4. Use existing child-participation platforms rather than building new ones. UNICEF’s India programming specifically integrates climate literacy into pre-existing structures like school safety programmes and adolescent platforms (such as Meena and Raju) rather than creating parallel systems — a school can do the same with whatever peer or club structures it already runs.
5. Start by shifting from content-heavy delivery to field-based, project-based activity within the existing curriculum. Biodiversity mapping, air-quality monitoring, and water-quality monitoring — with findings shared at school and in the community — are concrete, low-cost activities recommended in UNICEF’s India climate-education guidance, and don’t require waiting for a national curriculum overhaul to begin.

Frequently asked questions

How many Indian children are actually affected by climate-related school disruption? Substantially: UNICEF estimates 54.8 million Indian children had their schooling disrupted by heatwaves alone in 2024, within a global total of 242 million students affected by climate events, with South Asia the most-affected region worldwide.

Is climate change actually being taught in Indian schools, or is this a genuine curriculum gap? Both, in a specific way: NEP 2020 and NCF 2023 have genuinely expanded climate and sustainability content in the curriculum, but academic analysis finds the material remains largely content-heavy rather than experiential — meaning the gap isn’t primarily about absence of content, but about a teaching method that limits how well it’s actually absorbed.

What’s the single biggest structural gap in India’s climate response as it relates to schools? The 2008 National Action Plan on Climate Change’s eight national missions did not include one focused on education — a specific, documented absence that likely explains why school-level responses to heat and flooding have often looked reactive and state-by-state rather than centrally planned.

What can an individual school do about the curriculum’s content-heavy limitation without waiting for national reform? Shift existing lessons toward field-based, project-based activities — biodiversity mapping, air- and water-quality monitoring, with student-led findings shared locally — which UNICEF’s own India climate-education guidance recommends as a concrete, low-cost way to build experiential understanding within current curricular content.

What to do:

1. Identify which specific climate risk — heat, flooding, cyclone, or air pollution — most affects your school’s actual calendar, and check whether your current disruption response is planned or purely reactive.
2. Speak with one colleague or school managing disrupted-schedule catch-up learning well, and ask specifically how they maintain instructional quality during condensed teaching periods.
3. Read UNICEF’s “Paving the Way for a Climate Resilient Education System” report or NCF 2023’s climate-content guidance, and share one specific finding with your headmaster this week.
4. Propose converting one existing content-heavy climate lesson into a field-based or project-based activity within your current curriculum, rather than waiting for a broader redesign.
5. Set a review date four weeks out to check whether the change was implemented and whether students engaged differently with it, and write it down today.

Sources: UNICEF, “Learning Interrupted: Global Snapshot of Climate-Related School Disruptions in 2024”; UNICEF, “Paving the Way for a Climate Resilient Education System” (India); Climate Impact Tracker, “How Extreme Heat in India Is Disrupting Education”; Mongabay India, “Schools feel the heat as closures increase with extreme weather events”; “Climate change and sustainability: a critical analysis of Indian curriculum,” Discover Education (Springer Nature).