"Climate Sentinels" is a project promoted by A Sud, in partnership with other 7 partners and financed by the Italian Agency for Cooperation and Development. The project began in September 2023 and will conclude in September 2025.
Its main goals are to raise awareness on climate change and to enhance the knowledge and skills of teachers, students, educational communities, and institutions in becoming active global citizens capable of tackling and adapting to climate change.
The project focuses on:
- Strengthening teachers' knowledge on climate change through training courses, the sharing of best practices, tools, and educational approaches.
- Providing schools with an educational programme grounded in open and participatory science, global-local experiential learning, and the development of practical skills for climate advocacy, resilience, and mitigation.
- Mobilising local communities to co-develop and adopt Community Learning Agreements and to participate in public meetings on climate change, raising awareness among institutions and creating a strategic roadmap for integrating climate change education, mitigation, and adaptation into formal education systems.
The target groups reached, the educational pathway developed, and the project goals strongly align with the Climate Innovation Areas of the Education for Climate Community.
"Climate Sentinels" tests transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral processes for awareness-building, education, and training in formal, informal, and non-formal contexts, supporting climate education innovation in 13 schools across 5 Italian regions (Sicily, Piedmont, Lazio, Emilia-Romagna, and Tuscany).
The pathway 
embraces the complexity and interdisciplinarity of the phenomenon, bridging education with science and other disciplines, and promoting experiential learning and the development of concrete (Green) competences, as detailed below.
Teacher Training
The partners designed a 20-hour online training course for 150 teachers and school leaders, delivered through a modular, participatory, and experiential format.
The course is hosted on the "Training for Change" platform. You can access it here:
https://www.trainingforchange.it/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Programma-didattico_compressed.pdf
(Currently, all materials are in Italian, but we are working to develop and make them available online in English.)
Educational Program
The educational program involved 1300 students in 11 municipalities across 5 regions. It was implemented by the project partners and it resulted in a comprehensive toolkit that teachers can use in their daily work.
It consists of 10 modules, structured around theoretical lessons combined with practical classroom activities, as well as additional interdisciplinary experiential outdoor and territorial activities. The theoretical component was designed to address the complexity of climate change from multiple perspectives. It ranges from defining the phenomenon of climate change (Module 1, GreenComp 2.1 - 2.3), to exploring climate justice (Module 4, GreenComp 1.2), climate science, adaptation to extreme weather events (Module 5, GreenComp 3.2) and reflections on local and global responsibilities and injustices behind the climate crisis (Modules 1, 2, 4, 7; GreenComp 2.2).
Classroom sessions followed a laboratory-based and play-based approach, linking each theoretical module with a practical activity.
As mentioned above, the didactic programme extended beyond the classroom through laboratories and experiential activities that connect disciplines using experiential methods (GreenComp 3.3). These activities, with a participatory approach, offered in-depth exploration of key themes: field visits and mapping of climate impacts, storytelling activities, webinars with climate experts, exchanges and meetings with representatives of communities from the Middle East and Amazon Forest and a GIS Map to collectively monitor extreme events.
Some of these experiential activities are briefly described below, and you can find full details in our dedicated blog https://asud.net/sentinelle-climatiche-blog/ and within the classroom toolkit https://www.trainingforchange.it/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Programma-didattico_compressed.pdf
Examples include:
- Citizen Science activities: Citizen science is one of the methodological approaches used in various activities to foster a participatory and interdisciplinary learning.
→ In Sicily, for example, students used explorer's notebooks to document visible signs of global warming in their territories making climate change more understandable, perceptible, and interpretable as a territorial phenomenon
Watch the experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5bxpIQE5O0
→ On the isl
and of Pantelleria, a monitoring laboratory on alien species present in the local sea habitat was carried out. A process that led to the creation of a documentary to share and inform about this interesting topic. It will be available on our blog soon; in the meantime, you can find the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/1083200422?share=copy
→ The students collected data about extreme events in their territories that were organised in the geo-referenced educational tool, the participatory extreme events map. With this project schools become “sentinels” and local hubs to monitor the effects of climate change in their territories.
Map: https://sentinelle.mappa.asud.net/
User guide: https://www.trainingforchange.it/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Guida-alluso-della-mappa_compressed.pdf
- Other activities combined intergenerational knowledge, storytelling, creative writing, and climate futures imagination (GreenComp 3.1 & 1.3). For example, in the "Multispecies Storytelling" lab, students from I.C. Donatello collected environmental memories from adults in their neighbourhood and turned them into stories set in the year 2100, an exercise in collective imagination envisioning ecological, multispecies futures beyond anthropocentrism and climate catastrophe. You can enjoy the tale here!: https://www.trainingforchange.it/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Le-storie-del-clima_compressed.pdf
Community Learning Agreements and the Institutionalisation of Climate Education
Alongside the training programme, local educational communities, comprising schools, municipalities, NGOs, and parents, co-developed 11 Community Learning Agreements proposals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNkAJ6t0Ahw
These agreements were recognised by the Italian Ministry of Education as governance tools in the 2020–21 National Education Plan. They aim to build partnerships between schools - considered as key hubs - local communities and the administration to develop a common vision on the territories and, consequently, inclusive educational projects responsive to local needs. This tool is considered fundamental also to contrast climate change and to build awareness on climate and environmental justice, as it brings together territorial stakeholders in participation processes with the aim of improving everyone’s life, including at the environmental level. Within the project, the Pacts integrated this topic through specific “boards” that focus on it and that included also the opinions and suggestions of kids and youths - involved with laboratories.
To share and scale the work done the partners organized a national conference on climate education with the objective of drafting a strategic plan for the institutionalisation of climate change education within the national school curriculum.
This line of action involved 405 stakeholders, including civil society groups, parents' associations, school staff, public officials, local residents, and educators across both formal and informal education sectors. Recommendations from these meetings, focusing on the institutionalisation of environmental education, will be published by the end of September 2025.
Future Possibilities, Replicability, and Dissemination
Political agency (GreenComp 4.1) and collective action (GreenComp 4.2) are core competences we sought to foster throughout the project. The approach aims to empower schools and communities as hubs for awareness, monitoring, and climate crisis response, both in terms of mitigation and adaptation.
By treating territories as key components of systemic change, we hope to replicate this model in other schools and communities across Italy and beyond, developing an European model for climate education. Methodological and practical tools were created to enable replication and expand reach beyond the current partnership, these resources are freely available to maximise their impact and diffusion.
We hope you enjoy the project, and if you are interested in developing future partnerships, please do not hesitate to contact us!
Thank you for reading!
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