Global warming – an adverse effect of unfavourable climate change. Image by Chris LeBoutillier from Pixabay

Italy introduces compulsory climate change classes in schools

… making her the first country in the world …

Climate Change will be taught as a subject from September 2020

Global economic growth model will foster sustainable development

Italy is to become the first country in the world to make climate change classes compulsory in schools, Education Minister Lorenzo Fioramonti announced.

Classes in Climate change and sustainable development will begin when children return to class in September 2020 after their summer holidays. 33 hours — approximately one per school week — allotted to the subject as to be introduced in their annual curriculum.

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Minister Lorenzo Fioramonti explained to a media source that he wanted to make the Italian Education system the first education system to put the environment and society at the core of everything they learnt in school.

He added that the entire education ministry was being changed to make sustainable development through climate change the centre of the education model.

Fioramonti, 42, is a former professor of political economy at the University of Pretoria, South Africa,  who authored two books argued that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the principal instrument used to measure the economic health of a country — is not representative of how healthy economies are and actually presents a distorted picture.

Last September, he encouraged students to skip school and take part on Fridays for future rallies calling on world leaders to take more conclusive action to tackling climate change.

He described the movement — launched a year earlier by Swedish teen, Greta Thunberg — as “essential”, adding that students’ future was being “threatened by environmental devastation and an unsustainable economic growth model.”

He has also called for new taxes on plane tickets and on profits from oil exploitation to boost funds for viable educational and environmental models.

He was elected to Italy’s parliament in March 2018 for the populist Five-Star Movement and was promoted minister in September after his party entered into a coalition with the centre-left Democratic Party.