Realities of Teaching Climate Change in a Pacific Island Nation

Abstract

Teaching young adults about climate change in a developing nation right at the forefront of its impacts brings particular joys and challenges. This chapter discusses a teacher’s experiences in creating and delivering courses on climate change and disaster risk reduction to a diverse group of learners in 2017 and 2018. Vanuatu, widely acknowledged as the world’s most vulnerable country to natural hazards, was the first in the Pacific to provide this pioneer technical and vocational programme at basic and advanced levels. The chapter considers the background to delivering the courses, discusses the teaching and learning strategies used, and evaluates the contribution of the courses to adaptation to climate change in Vanuatu. It argues that the most effective way to teach climate change in a small island developing country is to focus on vulnerability assessment and ways of becoming more resilient to the negative impacts of climate change and disasters, adopting a hands-on, student-centred, experiential approach to learning.