Our Toolbox Has Grown
Since last month, I seem to have turned up everywhere on this platform. Don't you think? Someone asked me recently whether 169to1 was one person or a small committee. I told them it was one person with a laptop and a very understanding wife. She has asked me to point out that her understanding has limits.
I'm kidding of course...
All of this activity has meant the collection of free tools has grown quite a bit, and it seemed only fair to show you the whole set in one place.
Now, it might sound odd to say a toolbox has grown. Toolboxes don't usually do that. But to borrow a famous line from Jaws, and show my age in the process: "You're gonna need a bigger toolbox."
Every one of these tools began in much the same way. Somebody had written a long report, or a framework, or a policy document. It was full of important ideas, and very few teachers had the time to read it. Even fewer students ever would. Now and then it began with a sustainability café that whetted the appetite for a new way into the subject. In each case I wanted to do the same thing: take that material and turn it into something a class could pick up and use in a lesson both in and out of the classroom. I have been teaching since 2006, and in that time I have found that students learn far more by doing something with an idea than by being told about it.
The 169to1 Method Tools
This is where 169to1 started, and it rests on a simple idea. There are 169 SDG targets, and nobody can work on all of them at once. So you choose one and do it properly.
SDG Target Selector is where the method begins. It reads all 169 targets against thirteen controls you set about your organisation, covering who you are, the resources you have, the impact you want, your biggest obstacle, cost, time to impact, measurability and scalability. Every control asks what is true today. In under a minute it returns your top five targets, ranked. Each opens a Target Impact Snapshot covering what the target means, what you can do, a KPI to track, what is at stake and a reflection prompt, with actions written separately for businesses and NGOs and for schools and youth ambassadors. A Blindspot option lets you explore the harder, system-level targets.
SDG Traffic Light Toolkit takes the shortlist from the Selector and helps you decide which target to act on first. Each target is assessed on two questions: how feasible is it for you to deliver, and how urgent is it? The answers place it on a matrix. Red means rule it out for now, amber means it needs further assessment, and green means you are ready to act. What you are left with is one target and a clear first step, which is a far better place to start than 169 good intentions.
SDG Impact Index is the Prove step. The global framework has 232 indicators, and the Index shows that almost every one of them follows one of eight measurement shapes, such as a share of the population, a rate, a flow of money or a composite score. Learn the eight and you can read any indicator without a statistician beside you. It also points out that around nine in ten indicators are designed for national statistical offices, and no organisation can report them. So for each of the 169 targets, the official indicator sits alongside a Proof Point: one countable thing your organisation and or institution can produce, with the evidence needed to back it up.
ESG Pulse covers 27 ESG frameworks across 8 instrument categories, from EU regulation and global standards to accounting methods, ISO standards, national standards, and circular economy and product law. It includes CSRD, the EU Taxonomy, ISSB, CBAM, the Right to Repair Directive, the UK's sustainability reporting standards and Türkiye's TSRS. Each framework comes with its implementation dates, sourced links, the audiences it applies to and the SDG targets it can help prove. If you have ever tried to work out what all those acronyms mean, this one is for you.
GreenComp Pulse sets out the EU's GreenComp framework, all 12 competences across its 4 areas, with every knowledge, skills and attitudes statement rewritten so it can be read and used in a classroom. An audience lens shows which competences to focus on first and which to build alongside them, for schools and academia, and alternatively how it would serve SMEs, NGO teams and youth ambassadors for the purposes of education and training. You can explore one competence at a time or read the whole framework through, and every statement links back to the official EU source.
GreenComp And The SDGs is its companion. Every one of the 169 SDG targets is given a lead competence and two to four supporting competences, each with a reason, and you can move from a competence to its targets and back again. Each target also has an Education Snapshot: why it matters, a learning question, a five-step classroom activity, evidence of learning, reflection and action, and notes for the teacher. The snapshots print, and the sensitive topics carry safeguarding notes.
The Pulse Series
These began with a single tool and grew from there, which is roughly how most things in my life happen.
Climate Pulse is built from UNEP's Hidden Assets report on climate and clean air action. It has 25 solutions you can filter by sector and objective, and a returns curve showing benefits of up to 34 times the cost. A priority lens compares 15 regions, and you can switch it between 2035 and 2050 to see how priorities change. There is also an SDG view linking the solutions to 25 targets, clearly marked as 169to1's own reading.
Overshoot Pulse is built from UNEP's Limiting Overshoot report. A slider lets you choose between acting now and delaying. As you move it, the temperature curve shifts, the peak warming figure updates, a verdict line explains what that level of warming means, and cards appear showing who is hit hardest at each stage. If you are anything like me, you will go straight to Delay to see what happens, and reads like a definitive worst case scenario. Thank goodness we still have just enough time to act.
El Niño Pulse tracks the 2026 El Niño through ten forecast centres, including NOAA, ECMWF, the WMO and the UK Met Office, alongside three ensemble means and five context indices. It shows the traditional Niño 3.4 index next to NOAA's newer RONI index, so you can see why the two sometimes disagree. You can compare each model's forecast against an average of three independent forecasts. It is a good way to show a class that forecasters do not always agree, and why that matters.
TEK Pulse looks at how traditional ecological knowledge, and Indigenous and local knowledge more widely, bears on all 169 SDG targets. Each target is rated on two things: how strongly that knowledge matters to it, and how far current policy actually draws on it. Every rating is anchored in named sources such as IPBES assessments, FAO food system studies, UNESCO guidelines and UNDRIP, so you can see where traditional knowledge is vital to a target but still under-used. You can filter by relevance, switch between individual targets and the frameworks behind them, and open a snapshot for each target. It also includes a GreenComp bridging model and a How To Guide for Educators, with 12 classroom activities and 12 field activities that take students out to meet this knowledge where it is still practised.
School Garden Pulse is built from Sustainability Education In School Garden-Based Learning, an open-access book from Springer, alongside other sources including the Papillon Project, a Norfolk charity that builds school allotments. The Blueprint feature plans a garden across every term, winter included, for schools with land and for those without. Companions shows which plants help each other, The Biodiversity feature runs from soil, to pollinators and to ponds, and Learning holds eighteen ideas from the book. Build And Prove turns it all into a printable plan, and a lesson activity pack pulls it all together. And if you have green fingers like me, watching the fruit of your labour grow, is just as fun as harvesting and prepping the produce for consumption.
Planetary Pulse is built from the Planetary Health Check 2026 and covers all nine planetary boundaries and thirteen control variables. You can see the state of all nine at once, then explore each boundary in turn, with an interactive explanation of what its measurements mean and which other boundaries it affects. The Tipping Points feature shows how the boundaries push on one another, and every boundary is mapped to SDG targets and GreenComp competences. A teacher's guide and nine student activity sheets, compliment each boundary.
Energy Community Pulse grew out of the Coalition's Energy Communities Challenge Group. It is a readiness check for schools working towards carbon neutrality in the UK, EU and Türkiye, with nine checkpoints, 56 questions and a ten-step blueprint. It is aligned to the UNESCO Green School Quality Standard, GreenComp and 20 SDG targets, with guidance for each region and a Support feature of partner networks and funding routes. An 18-lesson pack and teacher's and student's notes provide a comprehensive mini curriculum.
In The Room
These two put students in the room where the big questions are being discussed.
The Algorithm In The Room is built from UNESCO's 2026 report on AI and the future of education. It gathers the report's 26 think pieces, which you can filter by six key questions and by whether each piece reads as constructive, in tension or cautionary, with a note explaining that reading. An SDG Map shows which targets each piece touches. A Horizons view takes UNESCO's See, Steer, Rewrite conclusion and leads you back to the pieces behind each idea.
Climate Resilience Council In The Room asks students aged 11 to 16 to sit as a Youth Council on the EU's forthcoming Climate Resilience Framework. They examine its five parts, learn ideas such as risk ownership and maladaptation, debate motions with real trade-offs and agree a shared position. A Prep Reader, teacher's and student's notes, and a Youth Council Survey for gathering views across schools come with it. Young people will live with these decisions longer than any of us, so it seems reasonable to ask what they think.
Film Companion
How To Live On Earth In The Classroom and in the Field is a lesson companion for the documentary presented by Benedict Cumberbatch, free to watch on YouTube. Built for students aged 11 to 16, it follows the film's three questions: how to value nature, how to feed the future and how to feel human. Each has activities built on the film's own stories, from the elephants of Chad to the removal of the Klamath River dams. Every activity links to the GreenComp competence it develops, and screening notes and curriculum links complete it.
All of them are free, and there is no sign-up. If you use one with a class, I would love to hear how it went, and any ideas you have for making it better. Every suggestion helps me improve the tools and reminds me that I'm still human. I did once make a mistake, some years ago, and I have been meaning to make another one ever since, just to see what it is still like.
And after all that I almost forgot to give you the links... its always worth it... to proof read your work.
Resilience Pulse
Coming Soon - The Resilience Pulse, based around the A World In Balance 2026 survey produced by CapGemini, we have turned the survey into an interactive and teachable toolkit.
The links: https://169to1.org/sdg-target-selector-tm
https://169to1.org/sdg-traffic-light-toolkit-tm
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