Rooted in Wisdom: Framing Climate Education Through the Panchkosha

While studying UNESCO’s Greening Curriculum Guidance: Teaching and Learning for Climate Action playbook, I noticed something unusual for a global, standardised framework: the word “spiritual” appears five times. In a 179‑page document, this may seem insignificant, yet its consistent presence across learning standards for all age groups signals an important shift. At the global level, the spiritual dimension of learning is being deliberately explored as part of building a robust climate education framework. 

The more we engage with the climate crisis, the clearer it becomes that climate change is, at its core, a crisis of disconnection—between our inner selves, humanity, and the ecosystems that sustain us. In Indian tradition, this disassociation can be understood as one dimension of Māyā, the veil that obscures our awareness of interconnectedness. 

Exploring the disillusionment around the climate crisis

Every year, we are witnessing things that once seemed unimaginable. Weather patterns that have shaped human life for thousands of years are changing, and the shifts have become increasingly stark. Daytime temperatures are rising, while nights no longer offer the relief they once did. Deaths from landslides, heatwaves, floods, and other extreme events have become so frequent that they barely make the headlines. Even when they do, the stories often fade from our collective consciousness within days.

Nature is speaking to us through every sense we possess. We feel the intensifying heat on our skin, hear increasingly violent storms, see floods consuming homes and landscapes, taste the dryness of parched earth, and smell pollution in the air. Yet despite these signals reaching us through every sensory channel, we remain remarkably numb.

Perhaps we have become so accustomed to disruption that the extraordinary has become ordinary. This collective numbness is shaped by several forces: the normalisation of crisis, information overload, psychological distancing, economic and social pressures, consumption-driven systems, and our growing separation from nature. We can see the signs of ecological breakdown, yet remain unable—or unwilling—to fully perceive what they demand of us.

Acharya Prashant points to this paralysis and argues for overcoming it through consciously putting effort into knowing the self, or atmagyan. He takes this idea further by suggesting that, at its core, climate education is also an education of the self: an exploration of how we perceive, think, desire, choose, and relate to the world around us. This raises an important question: What if climate education needs to engage not just what we know, but who we are? 

The Panchkosha framework offers a powerful lens for exploring this possibility. It invites us to understand the human being as more than a thinking mind—to consider our body and senses, vital energy, emotions, intellect, values, and deeper sense of connectedness.

Through this lens, climate education can move beyond simply learning about climate change. It can become a process of reconnecting—with ourselves, others, nature, and our place within the larger web of life.

By engaging these five dimensions of human experience, climate education can move learners from information to awareness, from awareness to connection, and from connection to stewardship—cultivating not merely climate-literate individuals, but lifelong climate stewards.

Bridging Panchkosha with Climate Education

If climate education is to address not only the climate crisis but also the human disconnection that enables it, then it must engage the learner as a whole. The Panchkosha framework provides a way to conceptualise this wholeness.

The five koshas—Annamaya, Pranamaya, Manomaya, Vijnanamaya, and Anandamaya—can be understood as five interrelated dimensions of human experience. Rather than treating them as separate layers, we can view them as different entry points through which a learner experiences, understands, and responds to the world.

This creates an opportunity to reimagine climate education as a journey that moves progressively deeper—from sensing the world, to experiencing it, understanding it, questioning our relationship with it, and ultimately developing a sense of responsibility and connectedness.

1. Annamaya Kosha — Reconnecting with the physical world

The Annamaya Kosha, associated with the physical body, provides the most immediate entry point into climate learning. Climate change is not an abstract phenomenon; it is experienced through the body.

Learners can begin by paying attention to what their bodies are already telling them: How does extreme heat affect us? What happens to our energy and concentration when temperatures rise? How does air pollution affect breathing? What does prolonged water scarcity mean for everyday life?

This dimension brings climate change down from global statistics to lived experience. It develops sensory awareness, bodily awareness, and an ability to notice environmental change.

2. Pranamaya Kosha — Understanding interdependence and vitality

Pranamaya Kosha relates to prana, or vital energy. Through a contemporary educational lens, it can provide a way to explore the flows that sustain life—air, water, food, energy, and the ecological systems on which human life depends.

Learners can investigate questions such as: What keeps me alive and full of energy? How does breathing connect me to the world around me? Where does the air I breathe come from, and what affects its quality? How do plants, forests, oceans, and other living systems support the air and conditions necessary for life? What happens to life when the air, water, and natural systems that sustain it are disrupted? How am I connected to other living beings through the air, water, and energy we share?

Climate education at this level moves from the individual body to the systems that sustain life, helping learners recognise that human wellbeing is inseparable from ecological wellbeing.

3. Manomaya Kosha — Developing emotional connection

Knowing about climate change does not necessarily make us care about it. Manomaya Kosha, associated with the mind and emotions, provides space to explore how we emotionally experience ecological change.

Learners can explore feelings such as fear, grief, anger, hope, love, helplessness, and responsibility. They can examine how environmental changes affect different communities and species, and develop empathy for those experiencing the crisis differently from themselves.

This dimension recognises that care is not a distraction from climate education; it is a prerequisite for meaningful engagement. It helps learners move from merely knowing that the planet is changing to developing a relationship with what is being lost, threatened, and worth protecting.

4. Vijnanamaya Kosha — Cultivating discernment and agency

Vijnanamaya Kosha, associated with wisdom, discernment, and deeper understanding, invites learners to question the systems, choices, and assumptions that shape the climate crisis.

Why do we consume the way we do? Who benefits from our current systems of production and consumption? Who bears the costs? What choices are genuinely available to us? What is our responsibility as individuals, communities, institutions, and citizens?

Here, climate education moves beyond awareness towards critical thinking, ethical reasoning, systems thinking, and agency. Learners are not simply asked to adapt their individual behaviour; they are encouraged to understand the structures that create environmental harm and consider how they might contribute to changing them.

5. Anandamaya Kosha — Cultivating connectedness and stewardship

The deepest dimension, Anandamaya Kosha, can be approached in climate education through the idea of connectedness, meaning, and a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself.

This does not require imposing a particular religious or spiritual belief. Instead, it can invite learners to explore a fundamental question: What is my relationship with the living world?

When nature is no longer perceived merely as a resource, an external landscape, or a problem to be managed, our relationship with it begins to change. Stewardship emerges not simply from obligation, but from a sense of belonging and care.

At this level, climate education becomes an invitation to develop a deeper ecological identity and a lifelong commitment to the flourishing of people and planet.

From Climate Literacy to Climate Stewardship

The Panchkosha framework reminds us that climate education must be more than the transfer of knowledge—it must be a journey of reconnection. By engaging learners across the physical, vital, emotional, intellectual, and transcendent dimensions, we move from fragmented awareness to holistic stewardship.

Climate change is not only an environmental crisis; it is a crisis of disconnection. Addressing it requires education that begins with the self, expands into relationships and systems, and culminates in a deep sense of belonging to the living world. When learners can sense, care, discern, and act from this place of connectedness, climate stewardship ceases to be a duty and becomes a way of being.

The Panchkosha therefore offers more than a framework—it provides an architecture for cultivating ecological identity and lifelong responsibility. In embracing it, climate education can nurture not just climate‑literate individuals, but whole human beings who live in harmony with people and planet.