Investigating UNESCO's Greening Curriculum Guidance: Climate Education and Spirituality

As we have explored in our previous article, UNESCO’s Greening Curriculum Guidance makes several references to spirituality across the curriculum progression, from primary through secondary education. What is interesting is that the framework attempts to be universal while also asking educators to contextualise learning according to local socio-cultural beliefs, practices and realities. It offers a strong starting point for thinking about what children need to know, understand and be able to do to become climate-literate.

But there is one aspect that we believe deserves much deeper exploration: what do we actually mean by spirituality in climate education? The question is not whether spirituality belongs in climate education. The more interesting question is how we understand its role.

Where does spirituality currently sit?

In the UNESCO framework, spirituality appears within the topic of engagement with nature. The framework describes engagement with nature as spending time in green spaces and bringing nature into everyday life for physical and mental well-being. It includes activities such as farming, planting trees, growing flowers, spending unstructured time outdoors, being around animals and exploring nature. It then adds an important cultural dimension: In certain cultures, engagement with nature is ancestral and spiritual.

Two learning standards illustrate this approach:

• Appreciating how Indigenous worldviews on the spiritual connection to nature contribute to biodiversity protection, such as the Māori concept of Taniwha and its influence on the protection of waterways in New Zealand.

• Appreciating how animals are seen as spiritually linked to humans in one's local culture or another culture.

There is a lot of value here. The framework recognises that human relationships with nature are not only scientific or economic. They can also be cultural, ancestral and spiritual.

But when I read these learning standards, I wonder: Are we treating spirituality primarily as a cultural way of relating to nature, rather than as a way of examining our relationship with ourselves, our desires, our values and the world around us? In other words, are we approaching spirituality through an anthropological lens—studying how different communities understand spiritual relationships—without sufficiently exploring spirituality as an experience of self-inquiry and conscious living?

We don't claim to have the answer. Spirituality is understood differently across cultures, traditions and philosophical systems. But coming from India, where questions of self, purpose, consciousness, consumption and our relationship with the world have been explored through diverse philosophical and spiritual traditions, we find this question particularly worth investigating.

Spirituality begins with the self

Spirituality begins with the self. In this exploration, spirituality is not conceived as religious instruction or the promotion of a particular belief system. Rather, it is understood as an ongoing inquiry into fundamental questions: Who am I? What do I value? What is my relationship with the world around me? What do I truly need? And are my actions consistent with the values I claim to hold?

This dimension highlights something climate education often struggles to address. We have become increasingly adept at helping people grasp climate science, biodiversity, pollution, energy, consumption, and climate risks. We are also improving at equipping them with the skills to respond—collaboration, problem‑solving, communication, critical thinking, innovation, and collective action. Frequent conferences and consortia, such as COP, validate these two domains. Yet the larger question remains: if knowledge and its application are advancing, why do outcomes continue to worsen? Why does each year bring more climate disasters and fatalities than the last? Why did the recent UNEP report Limiting Overshoot shift the goalpost from keeping global temperature rise below 1.5°C—an ambition pursued for over a decade—to a scenario where temperatures will exceed 1.5°C, peak, and only then gradually decline?

At ElemenTree, we are exploring one possible answer: perhaps the knowledge base guiding our responses is not sufficient. Perhaps something more is required alongside existing systems of knowledge. This discussion brings spirituality into climate education—not as a set of esoteric practices, but spirituality as a framework for self‑inquiry and for examining the relationships between self, community, nature, and planet. The idea is that if society collectively engages in such inquiry, we may move closer to the answers we seek.

What choices have we made, and continue to make, that have brought the planet to this stage? If consumption is the driver, what motivates us to consume? Why do we consume more than we need? Why do harmful practices remain attractive despite awareness of their consequences?Why do our values and actions so often diverge? and more importantly are we saving ourselves or saving the planet?

These are the questions about self and puts the onus of solving for the climate change on inquirying into collective belief and value system rather than finding alternatives to fuel the existing consumption pattern.

From Climate Knowledge to Consciousness

At the core of climate change lies our insatiable drive to consume. We exploit the planet because of this unending appetite. Spirituality offers a way to temper and redirect that hunger. Climate education can teach learners that consumption has environmental consequences—explaining carbon footprints, resource extraction, waste, supply chains, and ecological limits. Yet awareness of environmental costs does not automatically lead to behavioural change. The deeper question remains: How do I decide what is enough? Self‑inquiry is what begins to guide us towards an answer.

Acharya Prashant provides a contemporary Indian interpretation of spirituality that is particularly useful here. He frames spirituality, among other things, through our relationship with consumption: Do not consume that which will poison you, even if it appears attractive. He explores this through three interconnected ideas—renunciation, sacrifice, and asceticism.

• Renunciation is the act of letting go of what harms one’s well‑being.

• Sacrifice involves choosing something of greater value over immediate gratification—surrendering a present benefit to invest in a more meaningful future.

• Asceticism is the practice of consuming only what is essential, rather than everything that is possible.

Applied to climate education, these ideas become particularly powerful. Consider something as ordinary as footwear. A person may reasonably need different shoes for work, exercise, and daily life. But at what point does another purchase meet a genuine need, and at what point does it simply respond to desire, fashion, or the ability to pay? The self-inquiry question is not “How little can I own?” but rather “How do I know what is enough?” And that question has no universal answer. What is essential for a head of state may differ from what is essential for a teacher. What is reasonable for someone in a remote rural community may differ from what is reasonable in a large city. Climate justice also requires us to recognise that people live with vastly different levels of consumption, access, and responsibility.

Thus, the learning goal here cannot simply be to teach children to consume less. It must help them cultivate discernment—the ability to distinguish between need and want, well‑being and excess, sufficiency and unnecessary consumption—and to situate these questions within their social and ecological contexts.

Spirituality as the spine?

AI-generated Image

This brings me back to the UNESCO framework. The framework already gives us many of the building blocks of climate education: knowledge, skills, cognitive development, social-emotional development and behavioural competencies. But perhaps we need to ask whether there is another dimension that connects them.

If spirituality is understood as self-awareness, relationship, discernment, meaning and responsibility, it could potentially become a kind of spine for climate education. Knowledge, scientific understanding, technical skills, data, case studies and climate competencies could then become the flesh and muscle built around that spine. Because ultimately, climate education is not only about helping children understand what is happening to the planet. It is about helping them understand their relationship with the world they are part of and strenghen this relationship.

And perhaps the question we need to explore next is this: If one important part of climate education is about knowing ourselves and our relation to the world, can we really leave it outside the curriculum? Could spirituality—understood as self-inquiry, relationship, discernment and responsibility—provide that missing dimension? We don't think we have the answer yet. But we think it is a question worth exploring.