Educación, ética y cambio climático

Abstract

The anthropic alteration of the climate constitutes the main challenge for humanity in the 21st century. How it acts in the next decade will depend on minimizing its impact on current human civilization. Educational responses and tools must be part of mitigation and adaptation policies in the face of the climate crisis, as recognized in international organizations and declarations. This challenge forces us to rethink the ethical framework of educational praxis to question the environmental and social sustainability of the core values that have guided human development since the beginning of modernity. The climate crisis radically questions the identification between growth and development. It also shows that the eco-dependent condition of our species has been ignored for the sake of a notion of progress based on the scientific-technical capacity to manage the biosphere without considering its biophysical limits. The climate policy articulated so far has barely considered the ethical and social dimensions of global warming and, moreover, has been objectively ineffective. The climate threat poses challenges of synchronous justice, derived from the differential responsibility in its causes of each society and the different vulnerability to its consequences of human groups with fewer resources for self-protection. And it poses diachronic justice challenges, to the extent that an overheated planet will limit the possibilities of younger generations and those that are to come, to have a decent life. The timing of the climate crisis forces an urgent and emergency educational action, which places this problem at the center of the curriculum and of the educational practices outside the educational system. Moral controversy must be a central element in an Education for Climate Change whose ethical and practical imperative is the decarbonization of societies and lifestyles, from the individual scale to the global scale.