Chennai: How to identify climate change, understand its impact on communities, trace the history of environmental changes, and explore solutions to the climate crisis will form part of a three-day training program for more than 100 school teachers in the city.The Tamil Nadu climate change mission is organizing the program, in collaboration with the school education dept, for the first time in the city. It will run for three days, during which teachers will be trained in concepts such as heat, water, waste, biodiversity, and sustainable lifestyles, and will take a field visit to an ecological site. They will then be encouraged to share the training with students, instilling environmental awareness.“There are 20 climate literacy lessons offered by the state, and this training will condense them into five modules. The primary focus is on govt school teachers. The state has already trained 2,000 govt school teachers across 22 districts in the last several months. The aim is to cover 4,000 teachers across 38 districts by the end of Dec,” said Gowthaman, educator and senior program manager, ASAR, which prepared the training modules for the climate change mission.Teachers will learn what climate change is, how to identify it and its impacts on different communities and persons. The second module will give teachers a historical perspective of climate change — on how the environment has changed over the last five centuries.The third module will teach them the role of human beings and ways to create systemic awareness. The fourth module will expose them to solutions adopted worldwide to tackle climate change and success stories. The last module will be on the basics of biodiversity and the importance in conserving them.Chennai chief education officer M Kabir, who was present at the event, said that climate literacy was the need of the hour. “Schools are already having eco-clubs, where the need to preserve the environment and plant trees is promoted. The dept is also taking steps to introduce climate literacy through regular textbook lessons,” he added.
