Adaptation, Migration, Advocacy. A Climate Change Curriculum for Out-of-School Children in Badin, Sindh

This chapter identifies the urgency for climate change education in vulnerable communities that are already experiencing the effects of climate change-related disasters. Designing curricula for vulnerable communities, in this case out-of-school youth in Badin, a rural district in Pakistan’s Sindh province, demands a focus on strategies that can be leveraged for survival. This chapter illustrates the need to match curriculum design with research and reportage about the needs communities are facing. In Badin, where the local economy is driven by agriculture and threatened by the salinization of land as well as an increased risk to flooding, the possibility of migration is real. This shifts our understanding of what adaptation and mitigation mean for this population—youth need to be prepared not only to survive where they are, but to survive where they might end up.Vulnerable communities tend to reside in districts where the rates of literacy, school enrolment and retention are low—this is certainly the case in Badin. This curriculum had to rely on pedagogies for which literacy was not a pre-requisite. Project-based learning provided a unique solution to the conundrum of designing a no-literacy curriculum to teach strategies for survival in a community where best practices for adaptation, mitigation or migration have not yet been established: it allowed youth to work in teams, building their social and collaborative skills, to develop their own solutions and recognize the power of their own voice to advocate for their rights.