While educators are rightly occupied by the COVID-19 pandemic, the UNESCO World Conference on

Education for Sustainable Development was a reminder of another formidable challenge: climate change.

At first glance, the pandemic and climate change look unrelated. However, the two share many common features. Both are complex problems that reflect our fragile interdependence with the natural world. And both arose as a result of human behavior. Hence, addressing both will require profound changes to how we behave as individuals and a society.

This is where education can and must play a role. Education needs to ensure that future generations of citizens, leaders and policymakers are willing to and are capable of, transforming societies and creating more sustainable ways of living.

In the case of the pandemic and climate change, understanding the problem requires making sense of complex systems. This is no easy feat, because the causal relations between elements in a complex system are often counterintuitive.

The difficulty stems from the fact that elements of a complex system exist at different locations, different time scales and also different levels. Hence, an event can have effects that occur in a different place are delayed or seem entirely unrelated.

For instance, the link between not wearing a mask and the collapse of an entire healthcare system may not be obvious. An asymptomatic COVID-19 carrier not wearing a mask in Mumbai can influence the rate of infection in Jakarta, weeks later from the initial act.

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