Climate Education in the NCF2023: What It Offers, What Is Missing, and How We Can Move Forward
Climate change is no longer only an environmental or scientific challenge. It is a challenge to how we live, what we value, how we relate to one another, and how we imagine the future. For education, this raises a fundamental question: What should children learn so that they are not merely informed about climate change, but are able to live responsibly within a changing world and participate in creating a different one?
The National Curriculum Framework for School Education 2023 provides an important foundation for answering this question. While it does not frame the entire agenda under the term “climate education,” it places environmental education at the heart of school education and explicitly recognises climate change as an interdisciplinary domain. The NCF identifies environmental degradation as a major challenge and connects it with questions of justice and equity. More importantly, its approach moves beyond simply teaching environmental facts towards developing knowledge, values, dispositions, capacities and action.
However, when viewed through ElemenTree’s emerging framework for climate education, there are opportunities to make this vision more coherent, developmentally intentional and explicitly centred on the learner.
What does the NCF say about climate and environmental education?
The NCF's approach is significantly broader than treating environmental education as a chapter within Science. It defines Environmental Education as a cross-disciplinary area involving both natural and social systems. Understanding environmental challenges requires contributions from science, social science, economics, geography, history, psychology, sociology and other disciplines.
Three broad aims are particularly important here
Students should develop environmental literacy: not simply knowledge of nature, but an understanding of the interconnections between ecological, social, economic and political factors.
They should develop a compassionate relationship with the natural environment: The NCF explicitly connects environmental learning with Indian traditions, constitutional values and scientific understanding.
Students should develop an action-oriented mindset and skill set: The purpose is not merely to understand environmental problems, but to understand how individual, community, national and global actions can contribute to restoring the relationship between humans and nature.
This is reflected across the stages of schooling.
At the Foundational Stage, children are expected to spend time in nature, observe plants and animals, and develop a positive regard for the natural world.
At the Preparatory Stage, The World Around Us helps children understand interdependence between human society and nature through observation, investigations, field visits and local experiences.
At the Middle Stage, environmental ideas are integrated into Science and Social Science. Students explore resources, conservation, ecological systems and the relationship between natural phenomena and human life.
At the Secondary Stage, Environmental Education becomes an explicit interdisciplinary area. Students are expected to investigate environmental issues, examine different perspectives, understand justice and equity, analyse debates, question evidence, and advocate for action.
The NCF also makes a particularly valuable pedagogical point. Environmental education should combine classroom and experiential learning. Students should investigate their surroundings, undertake projects, engage in dialogue, participate in community initiatives and encounter environmental issues in their own contexts. It also recognises the danger of overwhelming students with environmental crises and explicitly argues that education should help turn despair into hope and positive action. In other words, the NCF already contains many of the building blocks of meaningful climate education.
Evaluating the NCF through a Climate Literacy lens
The question, therefore, is not whether the NCF is “good enough” on climate education. It is whether its broad environmental vision can be translated into a coherent climate-learning journey for children.
The first gap is that climate change remains embedded within the larger category of environmental education.
This has advantages because climate change is inseparable from biodiversity, water, food, livelihoods, cities, health and justice. But it can also make climate learning diffuse. A child may learn about pollution, forests, recycling, water conservation and climate change without necessarily understanding how these ideas connect into a coherent story.
A better approach would be to make climate education an organising lens rather than another topic. Children can progressively understand climate through the relationship between self, nature, community and systems.
The second gap is that the NCF identifies emotional connectedness and compassion, but it does not provide a sufficiently explicit inner-learning pathway.
Knowing that a river is polluted and feeling concerned about it are different kinds of learning. So are recognising that concern, understanding why one feels it, examining one's own relationship with consumption and nature, and deciding what one can do.
ElemenTree therefore places self-awareness at the centre of climate education. Climate learning can move through a deliberate sequence:
Reality → Emotion → Self-inquiry → Justice and Equity → Causes → Possibilities and Solutions → Action.
This creates space for children not only to ask, “What is happening to the planet?” but also, “What does this mean to me?” “Why does it affect me?” “How am I connected to it?”, and “What kind of relationship do I want to have with the world?”
The third gap is that agency needs to be intentionally developed, not simply expected as an outcome.
A student cannot automatically move from “I understand the problem” to “I can change something.” Agency develops when learners experience themselves as people capable of noticing, questioning, imagining, deciding and acting.
This is where the NCF's emphasis on inquiry, projects and community engagement can become much more powerful. Instead of asking students to complete a predetermined “green activity,” educators can give them opportunities to identify issues in their own context, investigate them, understand multiple perspectives, imagine alternatives and take meaningful action.
For example, a student studying heat need not stop at understanding rising temperatures. They might investigate how heat is experienced differently by children, outdoor workers, older people and people living in different neighbourhoods; explore why those differences exist; and design or advocate for a local response.
The fourth gap is assessment.
The NCF has a strong architecture of Curricular Aims, Goals, Competencies and Learning Outcomes. This provides a valuable foundation. But climate education requires assessment of more than conceptual understanding.
If the desired learner is someone who is inwardly connected and outwardly prepared to act, we need to understand whether a child is developing care, responsibility, critical thinking, agency and the ability to participate in collective action.
ElemenTree can contribute by developing age-appropriate climate learning progressions and rubrics that assess not only what students know, but how they understand themselves, their communities and the world, and how increasingly capable they are of creating change.
How can these gaps be filled?
The opportunity is therefore not to create a parallel climate curriculum disconnected from the NCF. It is to operationalise and deepen what the NCF already makes possible. A meaningful climate education framework could have four layers.
Building a developmental progression: Children should encounter climate learning from the earliest years, beginning with relationship and wonder, moving towards interdependence, systems thinking, climate science, justice and collective action.
Connect the inner and outer worlds: Climate education should move beyond “learning about climate” towards learning about one's relationship with nature, consumption, community and responsibility.
Making the context central: The same framework can be used in Ahmedabad, Almora, Sundarbans or a Himalayan village, but the climate questions should emerge from the local reality. Heat, water, forests, floods, agriculture and air pollution can become entry points into larger climate concepts.
Creating opportunities for real agency: Students should progressively move from observing and caring to investigating, imagining, designing, collaborating and acting. The aim is not to make children responsible for solving the climate crisis. Rather, it is to help them experience themselves as capable participants in shaping the future.
Ultimately, the NCF gives India an important foundation: environmental education should be interdisciplinary, experiential, rooted in local contexts, connected to justice and equity, emotionally meaningful and oriented towards action.
The next step is to make this vision more explicit as climate education.
The question is not simply whether children know enough about climate change. It is whether education helps them develop a relationship with the living world, understand the systems that shape it, recognise their own place within those systems, imagine alternatives, and develop the knowledge, dispositions and agency to participate in creating them.
That is where the gap between environmental education as envisioned by the NCF and climate education as needed for the future can become an opportunity — not for another subject, but for a deeper way of educating children about themselves, their communities and the world they are inheriting.
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