As COP30 wraps up under the Brazilian presidency, the summit’s theme—’Mutirão’—offered a powerful vision for collective action.

Rooted in the indigenous traditions of Brazil, mutirão describes communities coming together and pooling resources to build something for the common good.

This concept is more than symbolic. It’s a practical blueprint for tackling the climate crisis, bringing actors together, sharing responsibility and working as one.

Education is central to mutirão as it’s uniquely positioned to bring communities together and drive collective action to build climate resilience, starting from the school.

Yet despite COP30’s unifying vision, the outcomes of the summit revealed how difficult it remains to turn collective ideals into concrete global action.

Matching urgency with opportunity

The climate crisis already affects hundreds of millions of children worldwide.

Education systems designed during a century of relative climate stability now face unprecedented challenges. As hydrological cycles shift (the continuous movement of water between the ground, oceans and atmosphere) and extreme weather events intensify, frequent climate-related disasters have become the new normal for schools.

For children, climate change is a threat multiplier, increasing their risk of losing access to safe, sustained learning opportunities. A 10-year-old in 2024 will experience twice as many wildfires and tropical cyclones, three times more river floods, four times more crop failures and five times more droughts over their lifetime than a 10-year-old in 1970 based on estimates calculated in 2021.

If they are fortunate, children spend their formative years in school, developing foundational and advanced skills, socio-emotional and physical health, and simply being kids. Yet education is one of the most climate-vulnerable sectors.

The sector faces annual financial losses of $4 billion due to tropical cyclones alone, and climate disruptions have lasting impacts on learning.

In Pakistan, families were still waiting for schools to reopen 6 months after the devastating 2022 floods, with 92% unsure when classes would resume.

In Bangladesh, a heat wave last year shut down every school across the country, leaving 33 million children out of the classroom.

Children are also uniquely vulnerable to climate change. Rapid brain development and physical growth make them especially sensitive to environmental disruptions, with climate-related stressors triggering effects that can cascade throughout their lives.

Children’s faster respiratory rates, developing immune systems and limited capacity for thermoregulation (maintaining a stable internal body temperature) make them more susceptible to airborne pollutants, infectious diseases and extreme heat.

Mobilizing society

With its reach into every community, education is a powerful tool for engagement and is the best way to mobilize society to address climate change. Brazil’s mutirão at COP30 is a call to action, inviting ordinary citizens into the conversation.

The World Bank identifies education as the strongest predictor of climate change awareness. Access to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education as well as technical and vocational education and training will be crucial to fill the demand for green jobs and drive a just transition to ecological societies.

Education is also key for climate adaptation. A study of 125 countries found that girls’ education was “the single most important social and economic factor associated with a reduction in vulnerability” (p. 5) to disasters.

There is a direct link between the average number of years of schooling a girl receives and a country’s resilience to climate disasters.

A climate-resilient education system can also play a pivotal role in climate risk prevention, reduction and management as it builds capacity to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from risks that communities face.

The good news from COP30 is that 152 country climate commitments—the Nationally Determined Contributions due for an update this year—now meaningfully including climate education.

This is a major increase from only 40 country climate commitments in 2015 and could mark the beginning of a huge push to ensure that education systems around the world are truly climate ready.

However, education, despite its potential to mobilize societies, received limited visibility within the final COP30 decisions, reflecting a continued gap between rhetoric and sustained investment. To move this agenda forward, sustained efforts for a greener education will be needed at country level while the global discourse catches up.

Aligning all actors behind a common agenda

We need mutirão at the country level, aligning all actors behind a common agenda for education quality, equity and resilience, to bring education systems into the 21^st century so that they can face climate change and deliver quality learning to all children, no matter their circumstances.

One example of what mutirão can look like in practice is GPE’s Climate Smart Education System Initiative (CSESI).

With a budget of US$21 million, the initiative supports 35 partner countries and territories to strengthen the climate resilience of their education systems by: helping ministries of education to integrate climate change adaptation and environmental sustainability into education sector plans, budgets and strategies; and promoting coordination between key national stakeholders including environment ministries and disaster risk management authorities.

The initiative also supports partner countries to identify how climate finance can be accessed in support of education.

In South Sudan, a GPE partner country since 2012, the Ministry of General Education and Instruction and the Ministry of Environment and Forestry had never previously worked together. However, through the Climate Smart Education Systems Initiative, they established a formal partnership by launching a Green Schools Task Force, allowing for active collaboration between the ministries on shared priorities. This collaboration has led to the co-development of guidance materials on how to make education climate resilient in addition to more regular coordination between civil society, schools and development partners, helping to break down silos and build a shared approach.

In the Caribbean, securing climate finance for the education sector increasingly depends on strong, cross-ministerial coordination. Workshops held in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Grenada through the Climate Smart Education Systems Initiative brought together officials from the ministries of education, finance, planning and environment to build capacity for climate-smart project design.