Shiva Rajbhandari doesn’t want you to think there’s anything impressive about the fact that he ran for a school board seat at age 17.

He doesn’t want you to consider it remotely awe-worthy that he campaigned on a platform to turn his Idaho district into a leader on climate change, or that he won, against an incumbent, in the highest-turnout school board election in Boise history.

What’s impressive, he says, are his Boise public school teachers, who educated him on climate change beginning in seventh grade, not because of any state science guidance but because they recognized its importance. They also “told me every single day that your voice is powerful, that you can make a difference,” he said.

“This is something that should be accessible to every student,” Rajbhandari, now 19, told an audience at the Aspen Institute’s annual climate event earlier this month. But “not every student has that.”

Rajbhandari, like many of those I spoke with at the Miami event, sees education as fundamental to reducing the harms of a warming planet. By giving young people the skills and resilience to fight climate change, and by harnessing school systems – often among the largest employers and landowners in communities – to reduce their carbon footprint, education can unleash positive changes for a less-apocalyptic future.

“We must recognize that education is the climate solution,” said Rajbhandari, who spoke on a panel organized by This is Planet Ed, an Aspen project that has pushed to get education on the climate agenda and vice versa.

Here are some of my takeaways from the conference, both in terms of how climate change is affecting students and learning, at all education levels, and how education systems can tackle the problem.

Read the full article about education for climate change by Caroline Preston at The Hechinger Report .