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UNESCO is launching a Teacher Education Course on Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development (CCESD) in late 2011

First, it helps teachers to understand the causes, dynamics and impacts of climate change through a holistic lens. Second, teachers are exposed to a range of pedagogical approaches that they can use in their own school environment. This includes engagement in whole school and school-in-community approaches. Third, teachers can develop their capacities to facilitate students’ community based learning.  Fourth, teachers can develop future oriented and transformative capacities in facilitating climate change mitigation, adaptation, and disaster risk reduction learning..    

In a nutshell, the course is designed to give teachers confidence in facilitating  CCESD inside and outside the classroom so that they can help young people understand the causes and consequences of climate change, bring about changes in attitudes and behaviors to reduce the severity of future climate change, and build resilience  in the face of climate change that are already present.

This document presents a comprehensive methodology for school safety considering school-specific hazards, such as earthquake, flood, flash flood, cyclone, landslide, and tsunami. It also focuses on fire and road hazards and considers climate change related issues. This manual is specific to Bangladesh and aims to guide teachers and students to develop a disaster management plan that includes mitigation, preparedness and response planning.

Evoke emerged from discussions with universities in Africa who increasingly wanted to find avenues to encourage their students to engage in local communities and develop innovative solutions to local development challenges. The universities were searching for ways to engage students in real world problems and to develop capacities for creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial action that many believe will be the engine for job creation now and in the future.

Evoke  therefore is designed to empower young people all over the world, and especially in Africa, to start solving urgent social problems like hunger, poverty, disease, conflict, climate change, sustainable energy, health care, education, and human rights.; to collaborate with others globally; and to develop real world ideas to address these challenges.Players will be challenged to complete a series of ten missions and ten quests -- one per week, over the course of the ten-week game.   The "text book" for this course is an online graphic novel written by Emmy-award nominated producer Kiyash Monsef. 

The game's creative director, alternate reality pioneer Jane McGonigal, is debuting the game at this week's TED conference in Long Beach, California.  As she describes the game, "An evoke is an urgent call to innovation.  When we evoke, we look for creative solutions. We use whatever resources we have. We get as many people involved as possible. We take risks. We come up with ideas that have never been tried before. That's what we're asking players to do in this online game. To learn how to tackle the world's toughest problems with creativity, courage, resourcefulness and collaboration."

Africa’s educational systems are suffering from growing pains.  More students than ever are enrolling in school, but the supply of teachers and infrastructure have not kept up with demand. Educators say about 80 percent of African students are completing primary school -- thanks in part to the push to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. They call for universal primary education by the 2015. John Daniel, the president and CEO of the intergovernmental organization the Commonwealth of Learning, says success is bringing more challenges. SCOPESecondary school students at KwaMhlanga High School in Mpumalanga, South Africa. “The African countries achieved in 10 years what it took many developed countries 100 years to do two centuries ago," he said, "and they don’t have many resources left over to do secondary.”

“Girls who have secondary education … have on average worldwide one-point-eight fewer children than girls who don’t," he said. "That’s a difference of two or three billion to the population of the world by 2050. There is [one educational researcher, Joel Cohen] who says therefore girls’ education is best way of stopping population growth and climate change.”

The Commonwealth of Learning proposes open schools, using new technologies and new ways to meet the needs of school aged children, drop-outs, mothers who want to learn at home and working adults. He said the schools cut costs and save time by using new technologies, including cell phones. Secondary school curricula can be created and shared among schools without costly intellectual property rights.

Imagine, for a moment, that you had to walk for miles to find clean water. Imagine again, if you lived in a country devastated by civil war and humanitarian disaster, and your only source of water was contaminated by the runoff from refugee camps—garbage, human excrement, and people bathing.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon issued a statement today. “Water is the source of life and the link that binds all living beings on this planet,” he said. “It is connected directly to all our United Nations goals: improved maternal and child health and life expectancy, women's empowerment, food security, sustainable development and climate change adaptation and mitigation.” There is good news: there have been vast improvements in water and sanitation—so much so that 87% of the world population can now access safe drinking water, and is on-target to meet the targets identified in the Millennium Development Goals. The majority of these improvements have been in rural areas.

90% of the 1.1 billion people forced to defecate in open areas due to a lack of toilets or latrines are rural dwellers. Conditions such as these are the primary cause of the 1.5 million deaths of children under five years old due to diarrhoeal diseases, the UN reports. Such needless deaths have been called “an affront to our common humanity” by Ban Ki-Moon. In addition to faecal contamination risks, poor personal hygiene, agricultural and livestock runoff, and inadequate garbage disposal services can spread water-borne diseases.