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This July, we marked a milestone, Climate Generation’s 20th annual Summer Institute! For two decades, this cornerstone event of the Teach Climate Network (TCN) has brought educators together to share teaching tips, instructional resources, and build community.
Each year, the TCN Cohort Coalition and participants of the Summer Institute help shape the TCN offerings by identifying what teachers need most. In 2025, needs are changing quickly. With the Trump Administration back in the White House, shifts at the Department of Education, and a steady stream of discouraging climate headlines, uncertainty is high. But one thing remains steady: educators’ commitment to their students and to teaching climate change with honesty and hope.
That’s why this year we are taking a fresh approach to reground in how we center the realities educators face and help them build resilience in the classroom and beyond. Here are five key lessons we’re carrying forward from the Summer Institute into another year TCN programming:
- Strengthen relationships, especially local ones
If there’s one thing we know, it’s that we thrive on connection. Over 80% of Institute attendees said they loved building local connections and wanted to stay connected with their cohort leaders.
Why does this matter? Because climate change isn’t a faraway problem and it shows up differently in every community. What flooding looks like in Vermont isn’t the same as wildfire smoke in California or heat waves in Phoenix. When educators build local connections, they’re better equipped to ground climate lessons in the realities their students see and feel around them. These place-based connections help make climate change less abstract and more personally relevant, sparking deeper student engagement.
Local networks also act as support systems for educators themselves. Teaching climate change can feel isolating or even politically charged. But when teachers connect with others in their district, county, or region, they gain confidence, share strategies, and learn how to navigate challenges together. These relationships don’t just strengthen individual classrooms, they strengthen entire communities.
As one Summer Institute participant put it:
“Being part of a group with shared interests was refreshing. Despite being in different regions, we faced many of the same challenges. It helped me see the power of collective learning and the importance of localized solutions within a global issue.”
Climate Generation will keep nurturing these connections throughout the year, because when educators feel supported by one another, they’re more empowered to bring climate education to their students in impactful ways.
- Pair accurate information with actionable tools
In a time when reliable climate information can disappear from websites overnight, educators need trusted sources they can count on. But here’s the thing: resources alone are not enough. Teachers also need support and time to translate information into age-appropriate, standards-aligned lessons that resonate with their students. When educators have both reliable information and support for embedding it into their classrooms, they can shift from simply delivering content to equipping students with tools for understanding, critical thinking, and meaningful action. That’s why the Teach Climate Network provides practical examples, activities and curriculum, ready-to-use strategies offered in 1:1 coaching, and workshop time.
The Teach Climate Network remains a go-to hub for both accurate content and instructional strategies. And we’ll continue sharing resources, lesson guides, and professional development opportunities from our partners because we know building from what already exists is how we can best move forward together.
- Use multiple entry points to make climate approachable
Yes, science matters. But teaching climate change isn’t only about graphs and greenhouse gases. It’s also about art, storytelling, history, civic engagement, and student empowerment. By weaving climate topics into subjects students love and are already learning, educators can make learning both accessible and inspiring.
Why does this matter? Because not every teacher or student connects with climate change through the same lens. For some, data spark curiosity. For others, exploring climate themes through a novel, a piece of art, or a local history project creates the “aha” moment. Having multiple entry points makes it easier for educators to integrate climate content into their existing curriculum without feeling like it’s one more thing to teach. It also helps students connect climate issues to their personal interests, which deepens learning, strengthens retention, and encourages students to imagine how climate can be woven into their anything they do. When climate education is relevant to a student’s life, they’re more likely to remember it and more likely to act on it.
As one Summer Institute attendee shared:
“I came in focused mainly on the science, but I now see the value of a broader, more inclusive approach — one that connects climate issues to equity, local communities, and student empowerment. This experience reshaped how I think about teaching climate change.”
This year, the TCN will highlight teaching pathways that span disciplines, science, english language arts, social studies, health, and more, so educators can find entry points that feel engaging and tailored to their classrooms. By broadening how we approach climate change, we give teachers the tools to feel confident and students the opportunity to connect meaningfully with the most important issue of our time.
- Recognize that every classroom is different, and that means every teacher’s needs are different
Teaching climate change in the U.S. is a patchwork. Some districts fully embrace it, others barely mention it. While 44 states, representing 71% of U.S. students, have science standards that include climate change, the how it’s taught varies widely. In some places, climate shows up as a single unit in science; in others, it’s integrated across disciplines; and in many classrooms, it’s still left out entirely.
Because of this, teachers’ needs differ dramatically. Some are searching for ready-to-use lesson plans that fit into a tightly scripted curriculum. Others are looking for strategies to navigate political pushback in their communities. Still others want to connect climate content with student well-being, resilience, or social justice. In short, the way climate change is taught shapes what support teachers need most.That’s why Climate Generation remains committed to being needs-based in our work. We’ll keep a pulse on what’s happening in classrooms by staying connected with Teach Climate Network members throughout the year. That way, our resources and professional development remain grounded in the real challenges and opportunities that educators face every day.
- Offer flexible ways to engage
Let’s be real; life happens. This year, 20% of registrants couldn’t attend the Institute after signing up. Schedule changes, strikes, job loss, burnout; sometimes it’s just too much. We get it.
That’s exactly why flexibility matters. Teaching climate change isn’t just another item on an already packed to-do list, it’s something educators want to do well, but it can feel overwhelming without the right kind of support. Some teachers are just starting their journey and need quick, approachable entry points. Others are ready to dive deep into interdisciplinary curriculum or community projects. And many fall somewhere in between.
Providing multiple pathways helps ensure that every educator, no matter their time, experience level, or teaching context, can find a way to build confidence and capacity. Short online workshops give teachers fast tools they can use tomorrow. Recordings allow busy educators to catch up on their own time. Longer-term fellowships provide a space to collaborate, reflect, and grow as leaders in climate education. Together, these options make climate professional development more accessible, equitable, and impactful.
We’ll continue offering a range of opportunities in different formats so educators can plug in however it works best for them.
Find the schedule of events and recordings of past workshops on our website.
Moving Forward Together
Even if it feels like climate change is being pushed to the back burner nationally, it remains the most pressing issue of our time. As educators, we have the opportunity to empower the next generation not only to understand the challenges ahead, but to lead with creativity, courage, and care. If you aren’t a Teach Climate Network member yet, we encourage you to join!
Lindsey Kirkland supports on-going climate change education programs for K-12 educators and public audiences. As the Education Manager, she also develops a vision for and provides strategic coordination for programs focusing primarily on professional development for teachers and informal educators. Lindsey is adjunct faculty at Hamline University and supported the development of their Climate Literacy Certificate, a contributing author of NSTA’s Connect Science Learning journal, and an active member of Climate Literacy and the Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) and the North American Association of Environmental Education (NAAEE) Guidelines for Excellence writing team. Lindsey has served as an environmental educator with the AmeriCorps program the NJ Watershed Ambassadors, worked as a naturalist and education program coordinator for the NJ Audubon Society, and assisted in program development for museums, universities, and new nonprofit organizations in the United States and Australia. Lindsey holds a BS in Environment, Conservation and Fisheries Sciences from the University of Washington in Seattle, WA and a MEd in Science Education from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. In her spare time, Lindsey enjoys spending time with her husband and her son.
The post What Educators Need This Year, and How We’re Showing Up appeared first on Climate Generation.
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a 1.9% drop in emissions from oil and the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Emissions from coal continue to increase slightly.
The Global Carbon Project’s projections for fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2026 are preliminary, with a range that spans a fall of -1.5% to a rise of +0.6%.
This means a small increase in emissions can not be ruled out.
Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to rise in 2026.
This is primarily driven by peat fires and forest degradation in south-east Asia and is linked to the development of a strong El Niño event this year.
As a result, total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026 – marginally above 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
Research published alongside the report by the same team in Nature Climate Change finds that the growth in solar, wind and electric vehicles (EVs) now offsets around two-thirds of the emissions that would otherwise come from rising energy demand.
However, the deployment of these technologies is not yet enough to push global emissions into a sustained decline, according to the study.
The 2026 global carbon budget report also estimates that:
- Fossil emissions are projected to fall in China (-0.9%), the US (-1.3%) and the EU (-1.5%) in 2026, but rise by 4.4% in India.
- Oil emissions are projected to fall in every major region, with the largest drop in China (-4.6%).
- Land-use emissions averaged 4.9GtCO2 per year over 2016-25, around 21% lower than the decade before.
- Total CO2 emissions (fossil and land-use) grew by an average 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over the decade before.
- The remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C is 150GtCO2, or less than four years of current emissions.
- The land sink in 2025 was the highest on record, rebounding after being weakened during the 2023-24 El Niño. The current El Niño is expected to weaken the land sink in 2027.
- The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 427.7 parts per million (ppm) in 2026, 54% above pre-industrial levels.
(For more on previous editions of the Global Carbon Project’s annual report, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022.)
Total emissions edge up as land-use emissions rise
Total global CO2 emissions, which combines fossil fuels and land-use change, are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026, up from 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
The increase in 2026 comes entirely from a projected rise in land-use emissions, which are more challenging to estimate than fossil emissions.
(The global carbon budget groups emissions from fossil fuels and cement production as “fossil emissions”. Carbon Brief follows this convention throughout this piece.)
If land-use emissions had stayed at 2025 levels, total emissions would have fallen slightly in 2026 to around 42.6GtCO2.
Each edition of the global carbon budget updates the historical record as new data and methods become available. The chart below shows total emissions in this year’s budget compared with the five previous editions.
This year’s estimates of historical fossil emissions are around 0.3GtCO2 per year higher than in last year’s budget.
This is largely because the report now estimates a smaller “cement carbonation” sink in the wake of research published this year in Communications Sustainability. In other words, it estimates that cement is able to slowly reabsorb less CO2 over its lifetime than previously thought.
Estimates of land-use emissions have also been revised, including a spike in 2018 – visible in the chart above – linked to updated cropland data for Colombia.
The updated numbers show that total emissions have grown by 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over 2006-15.
Fossil emissions grew about 0.9% per year in the past decade, compared with 1.9% the decade before. Over the same period, land-use emissions have declined.
While the slowdown reflects real progress, a plateau in emissions is still a long way from the rapid declines needed to reach net-zero emissions and stabilise global temperatures.
With human-caused warming reaching 1.37C above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900) in 2025, the report estimates that the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C, with a 50% chance, is 150GtCO2 from the start of 2027. That is less than four years of 2026 emissions.
Meanwhile, the budgets for 1.7C and 2C are 510GtCO2 and 1,035GtCO2, respectively – or around 12 and 24 years of current emissions.
Fossil emissions made up around 88% of total CO2 emissions over the past decade, with land-use change making up the remaining 12%.
This is a marked change from the first half of the 20th century, when land-use emissions were larger than those from fossil fuels.
The figure below shows global emissions, split into fossil and land-use components.
Global per-capita fossil emissions peaked in the early 2010s and have since slightly declined. At around 4.6 tonnes per person in 2026, they are about 4% below that peak.
It is worth noting that this global average hides very large differences between countries. For example, 2025 per-capita emissions in India are only 2.2 tonnes, compared with 14.5 tonnes in the US.
