This paper was prepared by Ayman Qwaider and Ingrid Lewis and presented on Earth Day, 22 April 2026, by Ayman Qwaider for a CRIFPE mini-conference. The audio recording will be available from CRIFPE.
Inclusive education and environmental protection are often treated as parallel but separate fields of work. In this presentation, I argue that they are intrinsically linked, not only in their impact but in their root causes. Both educational exclusion and environmental destruction are driven by systems of inequality, discrimination, and the concentration of power. Drawing on contemporary examples, particularly from Gaza and the wider Middle East, my presentation demonstrates how these dynamics are not accidental outcomes of global systems, but the result of deliberate political and economic choices. I conclude by challenging current approaches and calling for a shift from reactive, fragmented responses to systemic, power-aware action.
1. Why did I choose to speak on this topic?
I’m an educator, trainer and advocate for inclusive education. I grew up and was educated in Gaza, an incredibly densely populated territory. Since the Nakba in 1948 forcibly displaced over 700,000 Palestinians, the territory of Gaza has been regularly bombarded and blockaded. Over the last two-and-a-half years, the total devastation of Gaza’s infrastructure has been a constant image on our screens. We see daily the images of entire neighbourhoods of buildings flattened by Israeli bombs. Less often, we see images of the destruction of Gaza’s green spaces and agricultural land. This destruction is no less devastating for Gaza and its people.
The long-term impact of Israeli bombardment and blockade on Gaza’s environment and on global climate change is astounding. Figures estimated a year ago (quoted in The Guardian newspaper) show the unbelievable carbon footprint caused by Israel’s aggression. In just the first 18 months, the conflict contributed as much climate pollution as the annual total of 100 countries.
As an inclusive educator and a Gazan witnessing unprecedented environmental destruction, I’m interested in looking at how these two issues connect, and how we can address both issues together.
2. Some key concepts
Let’s start with a quick explanation of the key issues I’ll be discussing.
Inclusive education
Inclusive education can be defined in different ways, but this is how I’m interpreting it for this presentation.
- It is a process of enabling every learner to learn together in their community education setting. It is not just about placing learners with disabilities or other special needs into a school.
- It is about ensuring that all learners can access education, actively participate in learning, and achieve, academically, socially and emotionally. It is not just about boosting enrolment (access).
- It is about responding to the individual needs of learners and striving for systemic changes that improve teaching and learning for everyone – the twin-track approach.
Climate change
This refers to the long‑term changes in land and sea temperatures, rainfall, and other weather patterns globally, causing extreme weather events. These can be naturally occurring changes, but for the last 200-300 years, humans have been the main driver of climate changes, mainly through burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas.
Climate justice
Climate change impacts people differently. Those whose lives are already more vulnerable – such as poor communities and people with disabilities – are more at risk of being hurt by the impact of climate change. Those who contribute least to climate change are often hit hardest by the effects, while the big, rich polluters who contribute most to climate change often don’t feel the impact. Climate justice therefore begins by recognising who is harmed and who is responsible. It refers to the process of protecting vulnerable communities and individuals whilst holding those most responsible for damaging the environment to account for their actions.
Ecocide
Ecocide is the deliberate destruction of the environment by humans, leading to severe and long-term damage to ecosystems. Acts of ecocide are committed with the perpetrator knowing that they risk damaging and destroying the ecosystem. It is deliberate and on a par with genocide and scholasticide.
3. Moving beyond parallel agendas
Efforts to advance inclusive education and to address climate change are often treated separately by policymakers, funders and implementers. But separating these two issues is both misleading and counter-productive. The denial of educational rights for all and the destruction of the environment are deeply interconnected processes, driven by the same underlying systems.
These systems determine:
- who has access to education, how much education, and what type or quality of education;
- whose land and resources are protected or exploited;
- whose lives are considered expendable or worth enhancing.
4. Examples of the connections
Let’s look at how inclusive education and climate change connect.
Climate change holds back our efforts to achieve inclusive education for all
When we assess the inclusivity of education, we look at what barriers prevent learners from accessing, participating and achieving in education, and we think about how to overcome these barriers. Climate change throws up many different barriers to learners’ presence, participation and achievement in education, worsening existing inequalities in education. Here are just a few familiar examples:
- Climate change increases the risks of flooding or other hazards, which makes the journey to school more dangerous or impossible. When travel to school is risky or difficult, or when families are completely displaced by a climate emergency, learners such as girls or those with disabilities are often more likely to stay home in the short term or drop out altogether.
- Climate change increases droughts and water shortages. Learners who are regularly dehydrated or falling ill due to poor sanitation conditions, or walking long distances to find water, cannot participate and achieve effectively in education. Girls often bear the brunt of this search for water.
- Environmental pollution makes people ill. Learners with poor health often do not fully participate and achieve in education, or if their parents are ill from environmental factors, they may not be able to support children to go to school. Learners with existing disabilities or health conditions may be more vulnerable to pollution-related illnesses, and thus more likely to miss school or struggle to participate while at school.
- Climate crises divert state and/or donor funds away from educational improvements. Instead of investing in accessible school infrastructure, inclusive teacher training and curriculum reform, scarce funds are used to respond to climate-related disasters.
Inclusive education is (or should be) a key tool in our efforts to combat climate change
Inclusive education is not just about getting diverse learners into school. It’s about ensuring they participate and learn. In terms of our efforts to address climate change, inclusive education contributes by:
- Ensuring more learners access vital information. The more inclusive a school is, the more likely it is that learners from all parts of society will access information about the environment. We can’t address climate change if only learners from a narrow sector of society hear about it in school.
- Helping learners to become critical thinkers. Inclusive pedagogy promotes active learning, developing independent and collaborative learners with critical thinking skills. We urgently need open-minded, analytical and critical thinkers from diverse parts of society to help us address environmental destruction and climate change.
- Empowering diverse learners to have a voice. Inclusive education helps build an inclusive society in which everyone has a voice in matters that affect them. Those affected by climate change need a strong voice to make decisions and hold those in power to account; and they need to represent all parts of society – women, men, people with and without disabilities, rich and poor, indigenous and migrant, etc. Climate justice cannot happen without inclusive education. An exclusive education system ensures that power and voice remain with the powerful minority who are unwilling to protect the environment.
5. Gaza case study
Let’s look at a specific example to illustrate some of the connections between inclusive education and climate change, before I then unpack the underlying causes and what these mean for our actions.
As you heard in my introduction, the situation in Gaza provides a stark example of how educational exclusion and environmental destruction intersect.
Loss of green spaces
Nature, cultivated and wild plants, domesticated animals and wildlife are crucial in human survival and physical and mental wellbeing – even if we don’t always realise it these days.
Estimates suggest almost half of Gaza’s tree cover and farmland have been destroyed. This impacts food producing capacity and undermines a crucial economy that enables families to care for and educate their children. It also devastates vital agriculture, horticulture and silviculture knowledge and learning for the next generation, and removes a wide range of career and livelihood options for young people.
- Moving forward, Gaza’s education system needs to revitalise lost green skills and motivate diverse learners to engage in green careers, as well as learning skills for generally navigating a world impacted by climate change.
Green space and tree destruction also has a huge cultural impact for communities who have always farmed or tended the natural world. A vital nature-connected culture (not just their knowledge) is being destroyed. We can see globally that when people lose all connection with nature, they spiral into increasingly climate-destroying behaviour.
- Gaza’s education system will need to nurture green cultures and reconnect children and adults with nature so they can rebuild Gaza from a perspective of empathy for nature and the environment, something their apartheid oppressors and occupiers sadly seem to lack.
Nature disconnection helps to drive the destructive behaviour of powerful and/or wealthy elites. The behaviour of Israeli colonialists in the West Bank illustrates this. In their obsessive drive to steal more land (and gain more power) they are destroying thousands of old olive trees, ruining an ancient ecosystem. That ecosystem doesn’t just provide food and income, it stabilises fragile soils, preventing erosion, flooding and desertification. The fact that this ecocide will ultimately hurt Israelis as well as Palestinians shows just how dangerous it is when humans lose connection with the natural world. Education systems everywhere urgently need to learn from this (and many other examples globally) and focus on reconnecting all learners with nature.
Extreme pollution
Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza is well documented. We know about the pollution from bombardment, burning materials, contaminated ground water, and millions of tons of hazardous rubble. And we know the huge numbers of children who have become amputees, lost their hearing or sight, or acquired other disabilities and mental health conditions as a result of 30 months of bombardment.
But the long-term impact of Gaza’s toxically polluted environment on learners’ participation and achievement in learning has yet to be determined. Inevitably, learners in Gaza will experience cognitive impairment, reduced concentration, greater fatigue, headaches, dehydration and breathing difficulties as a result of living and studying in a polluted, clean-water-scarce environment. They will face ongoing health challenges and experience greater absentee and drop-out rates. These pollution-driven barriers to learning will exacerbate existing education inequalities, likely hitting the poorest and those with disabilities hardest.
- Gaza needs to rebuild an education system that can contribute to scientific and health expertise focused on understanding and mitigating the impact of extreme pollution. But it also needs to be a flexible education system that accommodates and supports learners with long-term pollution-created health problems – as they are now likely to be the majority.
6. Beyond Gaza: a pattern, not an exception
The environmental consequences of conflict, and the knock-on impact on learners presence, participation and achievement, are not unique to Gaza. Recent airstrikes on oil facilities in Tehran, for example, have resulted in massive releases of toxic pollutants, severe air contamination blocking sunlight, and reports of ‘black rain’ caused by atmospheric pollution.
These events expose populations to immediate and long-term health risks. Again, the implications for education are direct:
- children’s access to learning settings will be disrupted;
- they cannot learn effectively in toxic environments;
- their cognitive development and active participation in learning will be affected.
In Sudan, conflict is bringing another range of climate-destroying impacts. Destroyed buildings and factories release asbestos, chemicals and other industrial toxins. Water sources are polluted with sewage. Sudan’s learners are missing out on education now but also losing vital skills and knowledge for future protection of their environment and future rebuilding of their agricultural sector.
These examples illustrate how climate destruction reduces the chances of achieving education for all. They also show how destroyed or inadequate education systems can lead to a downward spiral of lost environmental knowledge, reduced skills for climate resilience, and a dangerous lack of climate empathy.
7. Why is this happening?
It is not an accident
This vicious cycle of climate destruction, lost educational opportunity, and reduced skills for climate resilience is not an accident. It’s not even just a one-off deliberate act. It stems from a deeply rooted, ongoing system of power, inequality, and deliberate exclusion.
At the heart of both educational exclusion and environmental degradation lies a common driver: the prioritisation of power, wealth, and control and the sidelining of equity and collective wellbeing. In a nutshell, educational exclusion and environmental degradation are driven by the demands of capitalism, often combined with colonialism and racism.
In any context, the exclusion of certain groups of learners from or within education (whether this is girls, learners with disabilities, refugees, etc) happens because:
- discriminatory attitudes believe exclusion of certain people is justified;
- policies allow or encourage that exclusion;
- efforts are not made to advise or educate relevant people about the alternatives to exclusion and the damage exclusion does to all of us; and
- economic inequality has become deeply institutionalized, preventing resources and services from being offered to or taken up by certain people.
Similarly, environmental destruction is not simply an unfortunate byproduct of development or conflict. It is often the result of deliberate political, ideological and economic decisions to extract resources, control land, and prioritise short-term gains for those in power. The extraction of resources and taking of land is often done by powerful people or entities, against the wishes of the people affected by these actions.
Deliberate systems and ideologies
Systems of control which deliver unequal access to resources, restrict people’s sovereignty, and exclude people from and within education and other basic services are not accidents or temporary challenges. They are the outcomes of deliberate strategies. Such strategies are perpetuated by powerful states like the United States and Israel. They have been tolerated or legitimised for so long by other state and non-state actors that they are now normalised and institutionalised.
The scholasticide and ecocide happening in Gaza, the armed checkpoints preventing learners getting to school, and the ecosystem attacks in the West Bank are part of Israel’s deliberate colonial and apartheid ideology. The ecocide being caused by bombing oil facilities in Iran is part of the USA’s deliberate ideology to maintain a fossil fuel economy, control natural resources, and dispossess regimes that try to hinder USA’s access to other people’s resources.
These are examples of a growing trend of war and extraction economy, in which environmental destruction and social exclusion are integral features of the strategy of the powerful and greedy. The same systems that bomb infrastructure, contaminate land and water, and displace populations are also those that underfund public education, exclude marginalised groups, and limit access to knowledge and opportunity.
This is not coincidence. It is coherence.
8. Why isn’t it being stopped?
Many individuals and organisations are working hard to stop educational exclusion and environmental destruction. Governments and UN bodies have supposedly worked for decades on global systems to regulate inequality and environmental harm through laws, frameworks, and funding mechanisms.
While these appear effective on paper, recent events suggest that these regulatory systems are fundamentally fragile. Were they naively designed in this fragile way, with the assumption that extreme abuses of power would remain limited and controllable? Or were they deliberately designed to be fragile, like a smoke screen to enable ideologies of greed, racism and colonialism to carry on, whilst those in power pretended to care about people and planet?
Whatever you believe, the result is a system in which:
- rules are selectively applied in favour of those wielding power;
- accountability mechanisms are weak and discredited;
- destruction proceeds with impunity.
9. Rethinking our response: from reaction to intervention
Much of the current work in inclusive education and climate action is reactive.
Humanitarian organisations, educators, and activists are responding to crises that have already happened. They/we are reacting to the chaos already caused by those in power and wealth who have bypassed the inadequate global accountability systems. Often it seems we fail to recognise (or deliberately choose to ignore) who caused the chaos and how.
This raises critical questions for education and environment practitioners and policymakers:
- Are we recognising and addressing the shared root causes of educational exclusion and the climate crisis, or just putting sticking plasters on the symptoms?
- Are we positioned and willing to try to prevent harm, or only to respond to it?
- Are our interventions proportionate to the scale and nature of the problem?
If educational exclusion and environmental destruction share root causes, then our responses must also be integrated.
- To achieve an inclusive education system we need a safe, sustainable climate/environment in which children can learn without constant disruptions or the risk of physical or mental harm.
- To achieve climate justice we need an inclusive, equitable education system that builds the critical thinking skills, agency, empowerment and voice among the diverse stakeholders needed to drive local and global change.
Working in historically created or donor driven silos is no longer viable.
10. What does this mean in practical terms?
Addressing the interconnected crises of educational exclusion and environmental destruction requires a shift in perspective and action.
Whether we are working on inclusive education or climate justice, we need to focus on:
- achieving a deeper understanding of how power operates within global systems;
- advocating for greater accountability for those driving inequality and destruction;
- building our strength to confront political and economic structures, not just treat their symptoms;
- intervening earlier and more powerfully, not just reacting to the symptoms of the problem;
- working collaboratively between the sectors of education and environment, learning from and supporting each other;
- bringing climate issues into inclusive education and bringing inclusion issues into climate work.
How can we bring climate issues into inclusive education?
- Embed climate literacy as an educational right across all forms of education and curricula.
- Frame climate literacy as a basic skill needed by every learner (just like literacy and numeracy), and ensure that learning this skill is accessible to every learner, regardless of their abilities and status.
- Bring climate-related designs and adjustments into universal design for learning and reasonable accommodations for learners. For example:
- When thinking how to universally design a school to be accessible for all, consider how to keep it accessible or comfortable during heatwaves or other extreme climate events.
- As well as thinking about reasonable accommodations to support a disabled learner to participate in lessons, consider making reasonable accommodations for learners adversely affected by the impact of climate crises, such as those experiencing ill-health from pollution.
- Ensure that indigenous knowledge (such as local ecological knowledge and land/water management expertise) is integrated into the curriculum and not over-ridden by ‘modern science’ lessons taken from elsewhere.
There will be many more ideas!
How can we bring inclusive education into climate crisis work?
I explained at the start that inclusive education is not just about giving learners access or placing learners with disabilities into school. A large part of inclusive education is about pedagogy, making the process of learning more accessible, relevant and enjoyable for everyone.
A key challenge faced by climate/environmental programmes is how to get people to engage, understand, believe, and act on what they have been told about the environment. Well, that is the sort of challenge inclusive teachers face every day in class with their learners! Climate programmes could learn from how inclusive teachers make their lessons accessible and meaningful, and how they adapt content and methodology to the needs and abilities of the learners.
Inclusive education is also not just a narrow relationship between teacher and learner – it’s a family and community thing. Inclusive schools work proactively with families and the community to identify excluded or at-risk learners, support their access, participation and achievement in education, and engage the community in finding solutions to inclusion barriers in their context. Inclusive education initiatives may offer a way to engage with the community about the environment, how climate issues impact their children’s educational opportunities, and how to work together to address this.
Again there will be many other ways for climate activists to draw on inclusive education expertise. I have only scratched the surface in this presentation!
This presentation was a snapshot of how inclusive education and climate justice are shared struggles. They are part of a broader effort to build a world in which power is exercised equitably, resources are shared sustainably, and all people have the opportunity to learn, live, and thrive.
I hope you feel inspired to discuss or investigate further the links between inclusive education and the climate crisis in your own context.