With COP29 behind us, we’re at a critical fork in the road. One of those paths is viable for human life on the planet. And education has a central role to play if we are to mobilize at the scale needed to rapidly shift our relationship with the planet to one of sustainability, resilience and regeneration.

Countries are expected to deliver new, ambitious climate commitments by February 2025, and it’s urgent that they deliver.

The current trajectory mapped out in Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) puts the world on track for a temperature increase of 2.6-3.1°C over the course of this century.

We’ve already overshot 1.5 degrees warming at least 4 times in 2024, and Swedish scientist Johann Rockstrom has made a very clear case: we’ve breached 6 of the 9 planetary tipping points beyond which abrupt change in earth systems is irreversible: “Almost five years back, we entered the decisive decade where our choices will determine the future for all generations on planet earth.”

Countries with more education exhibit greater disaster preparedness and response, experience less adverse effects and recover more quickly from disasters.

So where does education stand after COP29?

At its heart, the climate crisis is a crisis of human capacity to problem solve, for which equitable quality education is not only important, but essential.

The World Bank asserts that education is the single strongest predictor of climate change awareness: attending just a 1-year university course on climate can reduce an individual’s carbon emissions by 2.86 tons of CO2 per year.

A shift to sustainable economies—the ‘green transition’—will also require skilled workers for an estimated 100 million new jobs, up-skilled workers for most existing jobs and re-skilling workers for the 78 million jobs that will disappear. This skilling will not happen without education.

At this year’s Conference of Parties (COP), education seems to be slowly climbing up the political agenda.

For the first time ever, education was included in the official COP Presidency program as part of the multisectoral “Baku Initiative on Human Development for Climate Resilience.”

This initiative has established the intention of the UN agencies, multilateral development banks and multilateral climate funds to collaborate under a joint statement confirming their “collective commitment to advancing human development as a cornerstone of climate resilience and pledg[ing] to work together to ensure that climate action is inclusive, promotes intergenerational equity and is guided by the COP 29 Presidency-led “Baku Guiding Principles on Human Development for Climate Resilience.”

Importantly, education is a prominent dimension of this agenda. The second guiding principle calls for investing in integrating quality climate change education at all levels of schooling as well as monitoring progress against climate literacy benchmarks by integrating them into national and international assessments.

The third principle calls for climate-resilient and low-carbon systems, and the fourth focuses on green skills, qualifications and occupational standards.

To transition away from fossil fuels at the pace needed to stay within reasonably safe levels of temperature rise, at least some of the $300 billion which countries committed to invest at COP29 for the climate transition should be directed to a mass mobilization of climate action in and through education systems.

What’s next for COP30?

To that end, all eyes are on COP30.

While the President of Brazil’s COP hasn’t been confirmed yet, the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change has established an advisory unit to begin planning for what is a highly anticipated conference in Belém in 2025.

Strong leadership at state level is already apparent in the Secretary of Education for Pará, Rossieli Soares da Silva, who is calling for the first-ever children’s COP and is planning a Children and Youth Conference on Climate and Education in March 2025 to prepare for the meaningful participation by young people at COP30. Young people are ready to show up.

Wisdom from youth voices

Child Rights International Network, Alana Foundation and other child rights organizations have been working with a group of passionate youth advocates whose recommendations to COP29 demonstrate the wisdom beyond their years.

In addition to calling for governments to make their NDCs more child sensitive and to integrate children in the climate decision processes, they’re also demanding education be a focus of the ‘loss and damage’ negotiations as well as compulsory nature-based education that emphasizes green skills.

For good reason, youth bring a much-needed perspective. The key message of the Children for Nature Fellowship states clearly that, “decisions made at these high-stakes discussions will dictate the future that [they], as the younger generations, will inherit, and will affect the future for generations to come.”

The challenges of today are unprecedently complex. We face an urgent decision for whole-of-society rapid action to stem the current climate trajectory. It's not too late as we stand at this fork in the road. Will the global community choose the right path?