This past week has seen unprecedented bushfires across north-eastern Australia and predictions it will only intensify in the coming months. Experts concur that the underlying conditions are driven by climate change, itself caused by increased amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Leading government and public figures have argued that we shouldn't discuss climate change during this bushfire emergency. Yet when citizens, and most especially our children, previously tried to raise climate change on the public agenda, Prime Minister Scott Morrison told them that they should 'stay in school' rather than participate in the global School Strike for Climate. Implicit in this statement is that children should perform their part in 'business as usual'. This presumption that our normal routines will and must continue denies evidence that these routines and obligations are already being disrupted by climate change.
What does education look like under climate change? Last week almost 600 schools throughout NSW and Queensland had to close due to the catastrophic fire danger levels. Consequently thousands of children missed out on school because of the climate change they were told to not worry about. It was evident that on those days it was too risky and dangerous for children to attend school.
This is just one example of how climate change is threatening, and will increasingly threaten, children's education. Both climate 'shocks' — short term, intense events like bushfires — and 'stressors' — long, drawn out and slower changing processes like drought — can negatively affect children's schooling.
Perhaps most evident is the basic issue of accessing school. As seen with these fires, disasters can prevent children from attending school if the threat they pose triggers precautionary school closures.
In some cases, school closures are caused more directly and devastatingly by disasters. The loss of Bobin Public School has left all of its children without the school many of them no doubt loved and all needed. Others' access to school may be disrupted not by an impact on their school as much as on the infrastructure, transportation and/or adults they need to get there, or on their home. Many children this week have been displaced from their homes. For many of these, this displacement will likely be for an extended period, if not permanent. For them, getting to their original school, or indeed to any school, will be one of the enormous challenges they now face.
Even for those able to access their school, their education can be badly affected by disasters and more chronic climate change impacts. Research shows that decreased cognitive capacity and school outcomes are related to disaster experiences. Children who live through disasters (including when in utero) can experience a host of negative impacts, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and family breakdown. All these severely impact on children's capacity to thrive at school.
"Climate change impacts are increasingly causing anxiety and other mental illnesses in young people and those around them, further undermining their ability to learn."
Chronic climate change impacts can have very negative effects on children's education too. Increased temperatures, for example, can limit children's ability to concentrate and learn. Extreme heat exacerbates related problems such as poor air quality and food borne pathogens that children are especially vulnerable to. As any parent or teacher knows, sick children cannot learn to their maximum capacity.
'Slow burn' climate change impacts on children's education are illustrated by the long and extreme drought many children across NSW and Queensland are living through. For some this is in addition to the fires, illustrating the compounding impacts of climate change coming from many different directions.
The acute financial pressure associated with drought can mean children are pulled out of schools, particularly if — as in many rural areas — they are sent to boarding school for their secondary education to avoid unworkably long commutes. The erosion of the economic base of communities due to drought and disaster adds to pressure on small rural kindergartens and primary schools struggling to stay open. Students, school teachers and other staff are all exposed to the resultant psychological and social impacts as well.
Climate change impacts are increasingly causing anxiety and other mental illnesses in young people and those around them, further undermining their ability to learn. But the answer is not to ignore climate change as if the offending information can be deleted or tossed away. As seen so horrifyingly this week, pretending climate change isn't happening only allows its impacts to mushroom. The complexity of climate change impacts is real, and challenging. This complexity is what our children will inherit to confront and solve as adults.
What kind of absences do we want for our children? Absences where they take a few hours off school to march in the streets with collective commitment to a viable future and engage in public debate? Or do we want the slow burn over many years with them cowering in emergency shelters, stressed, despairing and living towards very difficult and 'unprecedented' futures?
If our politicians seriously care about Australian children attending school and learning well, they will not demand students shut themselves away until the day their school is closed by disaster. Instead, they will show intelligence, wisdom and courage — of the sort school children have already been displaying — by rapidly implementing a radical reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and a transformational plan for climate change adaptation.
Lauren Rickards is Associate Professor and co-lead of the Climate Change Transformations group in the Centre for Urban Research and School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT.
Blanche Verlie is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sydney Environment Institute, at the University of Sydney. Her PhD is in climate change education.
Briony Towers is Research Fellow in the Centre for Urban research at RMIT University, Melbourne. Her work is focused on children, bushfire and climate change.
Bronwyn Lay is the Ecological Justice Co-ordinator at Jesuit Social Services and the Climate Change Exchange Co-ordinator at The Centre for Urban Research RMIT.
Main image: Fire crews wait at a property in in Colo Heights, NSW, as the fire front approaches on 15 November 2019. (Photo by Brett Hemmings/Getty Images)