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This summer Climate Generation offered a series of workshops through our TeachScience program which aims to connect the new Minnesota science standards, renewable energy, and STEM opportunities through teacher training and support across the state to prepare students for the challenges and careers of the future. We met passionate teachers around the state that are working to embed climate change education into their classrooms and offered a participatory workshop experience that fostered connections between educators and their broader community. Read on to learn more about the importance of these types of professional development opportunities, what we learned, and where we’re going.
Schools and Living Laboratories
The schools as living laboratories framework sees the surrounding infrastructure, environment, and community as places where learning can and should happen to prepare students to lead thriving communities. This methodology brings together teachers, students, families, research institutions, local policy makers, professionals, and other non-formal education institutions to transform schools into agents of community and address local issues that matter to them.
Schools as living laboratories look different depending on local issues and community interest, which is one of this framework’s greatest strengths! This poster explores some of the ways Climate Generation is using the framework to guide interdisciplinary climate change education that fosters collective action towards climate justice.
Education and schools ARE climate solutions
Schools around the nation are responding to climate change by understanding their role as a solution by investing in clean energy systems, school gardens and farms, alternative transportation plans, and weaving climate change education into their lessons. Many of these actions are student-driven. By embedding climate solutions into curriculum, educators can build the technical and adaptive skills students need to work intergenerationally as leaders in their schools and communities.
The Energy Landscape and Climate Change
What would you do without electricity for a day? A week? A month? What circumstances would make that harder or easier to get by?
Extreme weather events and irregular weather patterns exacerbated by climate change make this vulnerable electricity grid a threat to people’s lives and everyday routines. People around the country are experiencing disproportionate hardship due to our inefficient electricity systems, which create high costs for basic energy needs. Living in drafty houses with old heaters, poorly maintained apartments, and poorly insulated mobile homes not only costs more to keep warm, but puts families at health risks from cold drafts, mold, and noxious fumes or fire hazards from alternative heating sources.
Production of electricity must move away from fossil fuels and our current electricity system must be reimagined to be resilient, to meet modern demands and to keep costs low.
Top Climate Impacts on Energy per the Environmental Protection Agency
- Disruptions to Energy Supply
- Interruptions to Electricity Transmission
- Strain on the Energy System
- Increased Air Pollution and Climate Change
The Power of Green Professionals and Green Careers
Green Careers are careers that produce goods or provide services that benefit the environment, protect people, conserve natural resources, provide equitable and meaningful employment, or make the production process more environmentally friendly.
According to the Brookings Institute, training the next generation of green workers hinges on more intentional, proactive local leadership around a core set of challenges:
- The need to emphasize green skills more than green jobs.
- The need to recognize the greening nature of existing work
- The need to boost equity and reach more and different types of workers.
A just transition to a clean energy economy is a chance to close Minnesota’s education and workforce gap, bringing green jobs to all communities who have been hurt and impacted by fossil fuels and climate change so they can shape our future with climate justice.
Bring it to the Teachers!
Climate Generation’s TeachScience program offered 3 regional two-day workshops around Minnesota that brought science, engineering, and education together to provide a foundation for learning the new Minnesota middle school science energy and climate change standards and supported learners in building green career awareness and skills.
Teachers engaged in:
- Weaving together science and social justice standards
- Behind the scenes tours of a school buildings major energy systems
- Discussing regional sustainability issues & green career skills with green professionals
- School assessments and energy audits
- STEM focused renewable energy lessons
- Student led energy action projects to further transform their school into a climate solution
These workshops were made successful by connecting educators with local partners, including:
- KidWind
- Minnesota State Energy Center of Excellence
- School Facilities Teams
- Clean Energy Resource Teams
- Local Green Professionals
Through these workshops, we saw a rise in confidence in teachers’ ability to teach various topics related to climate change and green careers (Figure 1). Many educators reported leaving the workshops feeling “inspired” and “hopeful” (Figure 2). The participatory nature of these workshops built relationships with fellow teachers and community partners, helping us bring the schools as living laboratories framework to life.
“This was a very memorable experience. The hands on activities were great and I really enjoyed the connections I made with everyone that attended, including those that led the workshop. I learned new and relevant information I can share with my students, colleagues and school district. I felt empowered to do my part to help our environment and encourage others to do the same.” -TeachScience Workshop Participant
We are excited to continue this work and offer a year of support to educators seeking to deepen their practice of climate change and climate justice education through virtual webinars, connections to local green professionals, and opportunities to build a community of practice.
Climate Generation’s Teaching Resources
Experience Energy: 3-8 Curriculum
Experience Energy uses an interdisciplinary approach that helps students see that social, economic, and environmental systems are connected through a thread of energy, and that climate and energy issues are intertwined.
What’s in the curriculum?
- Self and group reflection on values
- Food and carbon cycles games in relation to energy
- Community energy use interviews exploring how energy use has changed over time and for different groups of people
- Why do fuels matter? Environmental justice mapping exploration
- School energy audits and tours with facilities teams
- Renewable energy “choose your own adventure” experimentation
- Assessing the school community for current climate change solutions opportunities
- Action planning for student led climate change solutions at their schools
Green Careers for a Changing Climate & Green Professionals in the Classroom Toolkit
As more schools and cities add renewable energy as an electricity source, there is an opportunity and need to integrate renewable energy and green jobs skills into our classrooms. It is imperative that we build a clear, well-marked path from education to careers to create possibilities for students to work in the renewable energy fields and create solutions that solve our energy problems.
Climate Generation has collaboratively developed 3 resources to help teachers bring green careers into their classrooms:
- Green Careers for a Changing Climate Documentary & Discussion Guide: a twenty-minute documentary that introduces students to Green STEM Careers as a solution to climate change. Students will discover these careers through interviews with eight green STEM professionals, learning the skills needed and possible pathways to a Green STEM Career.
- Green Careers Careers for a Changing Climate: a 6-8th grade interdisciplinary curriculum featuring hands-on activities to identify and practice various green career skills
- Green Professionals in the Classroom Toolkit: a resource to 1) prepare Green Career Professionals to teach about their career and its role in creating climate change solutions as inspiration for future generations and 2) increase educator and student awareness of Green Careers as solutions to climate change and the pathways and requirements for entering Green Careers
Seeing and using schools as living laboratories—places that bring science, engineering, and education together using their own environment and infrastructure—is an opportunity to encourage students to be scientists and social leaders working on climate solutions in their own community. Through training educators, fostering collaboration and connection, and addressing the systemic challenges educators face in offering quality climate change education we can equip the next generation with the tools, skills, and mindsets needed to thrive in resilient communities.
Are you a Minnesota educator interested in participating in the TeachScience Year of Support? Are you a Minnesota green professional, government official, or community member interested in connecting with educators? Contact danielle@climategen.org.
Join Climate Generation’s Teach Climate Network to follow our work, and to get connected to a community of educators and climate change education leaders.
Explore and download the resources mentioned here and many more free toolkits, curricula, and activities on Climate Generations Resource Library.
Funding for TeachScience is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR).
The post Training Educators Supports Climate Change Resilient Communities appeared first on Climate Generation.
Training Educators Supports Climate Change Resilient Communities
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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.)