Thirty-nine Education for Climate community members gathered online this week for the first GreenComp Café of 2026, focusing on the yesar's stretegic priority and the integration of sustainability competences in education.
“Students need to experiment with sustainability, not only learn about it,” explained Mariapia Borghesan, a lower secondary school teacher from Italy who opened the event with a practical classroom case study.
“When they create, question and collaborate, sustainability becomes real.”
In her contribution, Mariapia Borghesan demonstrated how sustainability competences can move from theory to daily classroom practice and extend into long-term, future-oriented thinking. Rather than treating sustainability as a standalone topic, she embeds it across subjects through project-based and experiential learning, particularly within STEM education. Students ‘learn-by-doing' by transforming waste materials into new objects, creating school gardens, organising environmental awareness activities, and connecting their projects to social causes.
At the same time, her approach places strong emphasis on futures literacy. Students are encouraged to formulate their own questions about climate change scenarios, explore uncertainty and reflect on long-term impacts. This question-based method strengthens critical thinking and supported the GreenComp competence of “envisioning futures.”
Systems awareness is also central to Borghesan’s methods. Through collaborations with local businesses and site visits to waste management facilities, students gain insight into recycling processes, production systems and resource use. These real-world connections help them understand the interdependence between human activity and natural systems.
2026 Priorities
Following the presentation, community managers presented the priority area for 2026: intergeneration fairness. Under this priority there are five focus areas teacher upskilling, bridging education with science and STE(A)M, youth leadership, whole-school approaches, and citizenship education focused on values and resilience.
Teacher training and systems thinking emerged as particularly strong themes in the discussion with the community, alongside calls to strengthen youth participation and deepen cross-disciplinary collaboration. Participants also suggested increasing the visibility of the GreenComp Game through workshops, classroom pilots and digital extensions.
The event demonstrated a growing consensus, by aligning community feedback with 2026 strategic priorities.
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