Amidst an aggressively heating world, a just transition for educators has become a matter of urgency. Educators are already on the frontlines of climate change: every day, they are contending with the worst consequences of changes to the world’s climate. From extreme hurricanes and storms to massive flooding, prolonged droughts, severe heatwaves, and sinking islands, climate change is already altering the education sector in indirect yet profound ways. Thus, educators are stakeholders in the discussions surrounding climate action and the crucial project of shifting to a low-carbon world.

The goal of averting irreversible climate change can only be achieved through a fundamental reorganisation of society. Decarbonising the global economy is imperative to this end, which means phasing out fossil fuel dependence and reconfiguring societal development to adhere to planetary boundaries. However, the necessary task of decarbonisation has also stoked fears across the globe of potential economic collapse.

In particular, the ‘jobs vs nature’ binary insists that any initiative to move to a low-carbon economy will come at the expense of economic growth and, by extension, workers’ rights. In response, the trade union and climate justice movements have forged the concept of a ‘just transition’ to address the political anxieties being provoked by climate change and the policies designed to tackle it. In a nutshell, a just transition seeks to promote social protection to cushion the effects of a low-carbon industrial transformation on vulnerable groups. Recently, it has evolved into a framework through which policies are envisaged to address the inequalities being exacerbated by climate change within countries. It is in this context that educators have approached the impacts of climate change on their sector and the just transition discourse.

Educators who participated in the study “Educators on a Heating Planet: Shaping Education Unions’ Vision for a Just Transition” are unanimous in pointing out the ill-preparedness of education infrastructure for the recent worldwide spate of severe heatwaves. Climate change has underscored the ongoing deterioration of many education systems with the increasing intensity, frequency, and unreliability of storms, hurricanes, and typhoons causing damage to many poorly maintained education buildings.