Giving Compass' Take:

• After the earthquakes in Nepal, the Ministry of Education and other NGO partners helped invest in building resilience in Nepal's educational infrastructure. 

• To do this, partners provided capital for building back schools, constructing safer learning spaces, and making improvements to school disaster management processes. How can donors help replicate these efforts in other areas that experience the severe effects of climate change?

• Here are three ways we can be more climate-resilient.

The catastrophic wind and rain of Hurricane Dorian not only left thousands of people homeless but also children and adolescents without schools. The Bahamas is not alone; as global temperatures rise, climate scientists predict that more rain will fall in storms that will become wetter and more extreme, including hurricanes and cyclones around the world.

An often overlooked result is the disruption of schooling, which threatens the physical safety and psychosocial well-being of students and teachers. The longer that school is shut down, the less likely it is that children will return. Moreover, research has shown a lower academic performance and a reduction in educational attainment among children who have experienced climate shocks. But, fortunately, the Bahamas and other countries can learn from work being undertaken in Nepal to keep learners safe by reducing disaster risk and increasing the resilience of the education sector to future climate risks.

Nepal is highly vulnerable to climate change, and has experienced changes in temperature and precipitation at a faster rate than the global average. Indeed, climate change is causing greater variation in weather patterns, and more extreme weather events in Nepal, like droughts that contribute to wildfires and monsoons that contribute to flooding.

A wake-up call for Nepal about its vulnerable education infrastructure and limited capacity to mitigate the impact of large natural disasters. The earthquakes accelerated government-led efforts to develop a long-term plan to improve the safety of Nepal’s schools.

The Ministry of Education and partners like UNICEF and international and national NGOs harnessed the opportunity offered by the crisis to build back better schools. They focused earthquake recovery on the construction of safe learning spaces with integrated child protection and psycho-social well-being and water, sanitation, and hygiene services, along with improvements in teaching and learning and school disaster management.

Read the full article about building resilience to climate change through education by Allison Anderson at Brookings.