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.
As COP30 reaches its midway point in the Brazilian city of Belém, Carbon Brief has hosted its second “ask us anything” webinar to exclusively answer questions submitted by holders of the Insider Pass.
The webinar kicked off with an overview of where the negotiations are on Day 8, plus what it was like to be among the 70,000-strong “people’s march” on Saturday.
At present, there are 44 agreed texts at COP30, with many negotiating streams remaining highly contested, as shown by Carbon Brief’s live text tracker.
Topics discussed during the webinar included the potential of a “cover text” at COP30, plus updates on negotiations such as the global goal on adaptation and the just-transition work programme.
Journalists also answered questions on the potential for a “fossil-fuel phaseout roadmap”, the impact of finance – including the Baku to Belém roadmap, which was released the week before COP30 – and Article 6.
The webinar was moderated by Carbon Brief’s director and editor, Leo Hickman, and featured six of our journalists – half of them on the ground in Belém – covering all elements of the summit:
- Dr Simon Evans – deputy editor and senior policy editor
- Daisy Dunne – associate editor
- Josh Gabbatiss – policy correspondent
- Orla Dwyer – food, land and nature reporter
- Aruna Chandrasekhar – land, food systems and nature journalist
- Molly Lempriere – policy section editor
A recording of the webinar (below) is now available to watch on YouTube.
Watch Carbon Brief’s first COP30 “ask us anything” webinar here.
The post COP30: Carbon Brief’s second ‘ask us anything’ webinar appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Mohamed Adow is the Founder and Director of Power Shift Africa
A sobering truth hangs over the COP30 climate talks in Belém: negotiators are discussing adaptation indicators with the enthusiasm of technocrats while quietly starving frontline communities of the resources they need to survive.
The UN’s latest adaptation gap report could not be clearer. Needs are skyrocketing. Finance is collapsing. And yet the global community continues to debate how to measure progress, rather than how to enable it. They act as if weighing a cow will make it fatter, rather than giving it any food.
This contradiction exposes the heart of the climate crisis: adaptation is not merely a technical challenge; it is a political and moral one. Every finance gap is a justice gap. Behind every unmet target are farmers who cannot plant, families who cannot rebuild, and communities forced into displacement because “resilience” was promised but never delivered.
Adaptation is the difference between dignity and despair. It determines whether societies can endure rising temperatures, intensifying floods, or prolonged droughts — or whether they are pushed beyond the limits of survival.
Yet, as negotiators haggle over the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) and its indicators, the foundations needed to achieve these goals are crumbling. How do we talk about climate-resilient development when the means to achieve it are drying up? How do we measure resilience while draining the very resources that make resilience possible?
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COP30 Bulletin Day 5: COP30 could greenlight work on a fossil fuel transition roadmap
At the climate talks in Belém, governments are considering whether to launch a process to craft a roadmap and how that might look -
COP30 Bulletin Day 6: First week ends with a colourful march and much work left to do
UN climate chief Simon Stiell tells governments “to give a little to get a lot”, as many thorny issues remain for ministers to resolve next week
At COP30, countries must resist the impulse to rush through a weak indicator framework simply to claim progress. This would give us a system that measures activity, not impact. – that measures paperwork, not protection.
Africa is championing a fit for purpose GGA, but some have misunderstood and wrongly accused it of stalling the GGA process. But Africa is not delaying adaptation work. Africa is living adaptation every day. For us, adaptation is not a choice or a policy preference or an interesting side issue. It is an existential threat that is already reshaping livelihoods, economies, and ecosystems.
Africa needs this COP to get the GGA right. What we reject is an approach that turns adaptation into an exercise in reporting rather than a vehicle for survival.
A meaningful GGA must track whether finance actually reaches those who need it, whether technologies are shared equitably, and whether vulnerable countries are being supported to build early-warning systems, climate-resilient infrastructure, water security, and heat-resilient health systems. Without this backbone of finance and technology-sharing by the rich world, adaptation indicators become little more than an empty checklist.
And this is where COP30 stands at a crossroads. If rich countries succeed in pushing through a set of indicators that sideline finance, it will confirm that the world’s poorest are once again being asked to run a race with no shoes. No community can adapt without resources. No farmer can withstand worsening heatwaves without irrigation and drought-resistant seeds. No coastal town can protect its people without early-warning systems and resilient infrastructure. To pretend otherwise is not merely flawed policy; it is a profound injustice.
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Let’s tax luxury air travel to fund climate adaptation and loss and damage
Taxes on private jets and first and business class would be fair, popular and bring in tens of billions of dollars each year to help countries cope with climate change -
Business-as-usual: Donors pour climate adaptation finance into big infrastructure, neglecting local needs
A deep-sea port project in Bangladesh highlights how some major donor nations are labelling funds for industry-friendly transport and energy projects as adaptation finance, reporting by Climate Home News shows -
Global South’s climate adaptation bill to top $300 billion a year by 2035: UN
Warning over massive shortfall in climate adaptation funding comes days before COP30 in Brazil, where the issue is set to be a major theme
Some will argue that indicators and finance should remain separate discussions. But this is a fiction. You cannot track progress on adaptation without the means to adapt. Adaptation is where political decisions determine whether people live safely or suffer needlessly.
The world is not short of evidence of this suffering, it is short of political courage. Extreme weather displaces more than 30 million people a year, with Africa bearing the brunt. While communities rebuild with scarce resources, developed countries continue to cut aid or repackage support as loans which shackles poor countries with eye-watering debt. This does not build resilience — it entrenches vulnerability.
The Global Goal on Adaptation will become a white elephant if it is not paired with predictable, grant-based finance. Indicators that pretend adaptation is happening without resourcing it will fail the people they claim to protect. COP30 is the moment to close the distance between science and solidarity: wealthy nations must scale up adaptation finance, share technologies, and support long-term resilience planning.
Until then, the world’s most vulnerable will continue carrying the heaviest burden with the lightest support — a defining injustice of our time.
The post Global Goal on Adaptation: Weighing the cow won’t make it fatter appeared first on Climate Home News.
Global Goal on Adaptation: Weighing the cow won’t make it fatter
Last Monday, to get the COP30 agenda agreed, Brazil promised to hold consultations on four controversial issues: emissions-cutting, transparency, trade and finance. Last night, after most delegates had spent their day off exploring the Amazon, the Presidency released a five-page document summarising what was said in those consultations.
Nothing in that “summary note” has been agreed by countries. But it collects together divergent views and forms the basis of what could become a politically agreed statement (known in the jargon as a cover decision) at the end of the COP. It has three key strands on boosting climate finance, strengthening emissions reductions and tackling trade measures linked to decarbonisation.
It includes the key rhetorical messages the COP30 presidency wants to include – that this is a “COP of Truth”, multilateralism is alive (despite President Trump’s efforts to thwart climate action) and the Paris Agreement is now moving from negotiation to implementation.
On emissions-cutting and the need to raise ambition – sorely lacking after the latest round of national climate plans (NDCs) – the note includes an option to hold an annual review and explore the “opportunities, barriers and enablers” to achieve the global efforts agreed at COP28 in Dubai to triple renewable energy and double energy efficiency by 2030; accelerate action to transition away from fossil fuels; and halt and reverse deforestation. This is essentially where any reference to a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels could be anchored.
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COP30 Bulletin Day 5: COP30 could greenlight work on a fossil fuel transition roadmap
At the climate talks in Belém, governments are considering whether to launch a process to craft a roadmap and how that might look -
COP30 Bulletin Day 6: First week ends with a colourful march and much work left to do
UN climate chief Simon Stiell tells governments “to give a little to get a lot”, as many thorny issues remain for ministers to resolve next week
The document also includes proposals to “urge” developed nations to include finance in their NDC climate plans and “encourage” all countries that have set a range of percentage emissions reductions in their NDCs – like the EU’s 66.25-72.5% – to move toward the upper end of the range.
On finance, options include a three-year work programme on provision of finance by wealthy governments and a goal to triple adaptation finance (something the least-developed countries are pushing for) or just repeating the finance goal agreed at COP29 and “noting” a new roadmap to achieve that (which rich nations very much prefer).
There are also various options for how to talk about where climate and trade overlap: an annual dialogue, roundtables, consultations, a new platform or just to keep discussing in the ‘response measures’ strand of climate talks.
Li Shuo, head of the Asia Society Policy Institute’s China Climate Hub, told Climate Home News it was highly significant that – after two years of the issue being buried in climate talks – trade has now been “anchored in the endgame of this COP”.
The various potential outcomes in the summary note could be included in existing agenda items or they could be lumped together into what is usually referred to as a cover text but the Brazilian government would likely prefer to call a “mutirão decision” or a delivery, response or global action plan.
Essentially, after governments ignored the presidency’s pleas not to add contentious items to the agenda, it looks like they could get at least some of what they want by turning those issues into the headline deal from COP30 .
At the start of the high-level segment of the conference on Monday morning, where environment ministers deliver their speeches, UN climate chief Simon Stiell urged governments “to get to the hardest issues fast”.
“When these issues get pushed deep into extra time, everybody loses. We absolutely cannot afford to waste time on tactical delays or stone-walling,” he added.
The presidency consultations on the issues in the note will continue on Monday, along with negotiations on adaptation metrics and a Just Transition Work Programme among others. The COP30 president then plans to convene a “Mutirao” meeting of ministers and heads of delegation on Tuesday “to bring together various outcomes”.
Korea joins coal phase-out coalition at COP30
As fossil fuels have grabbed headlines at COP30, major coal producer South Korea kicked off the second week of the Belém conference with an actual concrete pledge: the country will phase out most of its coal power by 2040.
Operating the seventh-largest coal fleet in the world, Korea announced on Monday that it will join the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA), an initiative launched in 2017 by the UK and Canada to encourage countries to wean themselves off the planet’s largest source of emissions. Oil and gas exporter Bahrain is another new member.
Asian industrial giant Korea said that out of 62 operating coal power plants, it will commit to retiring 40 of them by 2040. The phase-out date of the remaining 22 plants “will be determined based on economic and environmental feasibility”.
Korean Minister of Environment Kim Sung-Hwan said at an event announcing the pledge that the country will play a “leading role” in the energy transition.
“South Korea is known as a manufacturing powerhouse. Unfortunately renewable energy has taken a low share in our power mix, but going forward we are determined to foster renewable energy industries,” he told journalists. “We will show the world that we can create a decarbonised energy transition.”
Asked about a fossil fuel transition roadmap – an idea floated around by many governments in Belém – Sung-Hwan said “humanity and all of the governments should work together to achieve a decarbonised green transition”, adding that “COP30 will be an important momentum”.
UK climate minister Katie White said Korea was taking an “ambitious step”, and that they can “reap the rewards that we are seeing from our own clean energy transition”.
Korea is a major importer of oil and gas. Domestically, it has historically relied on coal for electricity, but the country’s production of the fossil fuel has decreased steadily by 86% in the last 25 years, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Their nuclear fleet, on the other hand, has nearly doubled in the same time period.
The post COP30 Bulletin Day 7: Brazil outlines options for a possible deal in Belém appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP30 Bulletin Day 7: Brazil sets out options to reach a deal in Belém
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