A school for climate migrant children: challenges for education in times of climate change Una escuela para los niños migrantes climáticos: desafíos para la educación en tiempos de cambio climático

Abstract

Climate change is a present reality and calls urgently for a rethinking of the education of children and young people within scenarios loaded with high doses of environmental, social and economic uncertainty and vulnerability. The school, in its broadest sense, is called upon to convey curricular and organizational transformations aimed at integrating populations subject to climate pressures, and territorially forced to mobilize in the search for opportunities for their livelihoods, in order to guarantee a relevant education for climate migrants. This important segment of society is invisible in current educational policies and programs in most environmentally vulnerable countries. The purpose of this article is to reflect on the need to rethink education to address the thousands of children and young migrants due to the effects of climate change. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) estimated that in 2017 some 30.6 million new displacements were triggered by natural disasters in some 200 countries, from Asia, the Pacific and the Americas. From regions with high environmental and social vulnerability, families are starting to travel within and outside their countries in search of better climate, soil, food, water and sanitation conditions.  This essay analyses the implications of the future climate on the functioning of schools and vulnerable communities; it characterizes the phenomenon of migration of school-age children and young people and its repercussions on school continuation and exclusion and, as a corollary, proposes some strategies for adapting schools to a scenario of future climate migration.