I have written recently that we need a transformative system -wide change process across our education and learning programmes and institutions to tackle the wicked global issues we face. This recently published Skills Guide puts some astonishingly accessible and credible ways to achieve this transformation. It deals with inner skills such as “thinking ,relating, collaborating and acting”-all of which might be developed within individuals but may also be demonstrated in collective groups. But it’s the application of these skills which is crucial to our very survival on planet earth. I’m posting the full text here because I hope this will be disseminated as widely as possibly as a common framework we can all adopt in our work to mitigate and adapt to our twin existential crises of climate change and the depletion of biodiversity?
Given the urgency and all-encompassing nature of climate change, every person, community, and organization must eventually participate in a response. The primary challenge is no longer to develop new technologies or policy ideas. It is rather a challenge of collaboration and implementation at an unprecedented rate, scale and depth. Transformation is needed in our built environment, our food and energy systems, our economies, and most fundamentally, in our relationships with each other and the natural world. To meet these extraordinary challenges, societies need radically better ways to collaborate, make decisions, solve problems and enact change.
Understanding the issue–its causes, impacts, and solutions–is critical in activating concern and motivating engagement with solutions. But while knowledge of Earth systems and the human influences of climate change is necessary, it is not sufficient. Also required are the human qualities and skills needed to translate understanding into effective, transformative collective action. Some of the skills we need will be practical or technical, such as installing solar panels or changing the way we grow crops.
But perhaps more important (and often overlooked) are the foundational inner skills that underpin our ability to perceive, think, and act in the world. For instance, the capacity for people’s ‘complexity awareness’ supports wise decision-making by helping us see more of the system that we are embedded in.
This guide to transformative skills for climate action expands climate literacy to encompass those inner skills, qualities and capacities that help translate scientific understanding into transformative shifts in the way we do things, individually and collectively.
The hope is that this guide will help educators and practitioners shift culture equip the whole of society with these essential inner resources.
The guide can be read here.
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