Education minister: Two initiatives presented at COP29 - eco-literacy, university sustainability rating

Azerbaijan continues its efforts to incorporate climate change into educational curricula. The main initiative at COP29 was to introduce climate or environmental literacy assessment as part of international assessment projects, specifically PISA (and not just as part of the national agenda, but the global one), Minister of Education Emin Amrullayev said at a press conference during COP29, Report informs.

"I believe that that's a great opportunity for many stakeholders to have the right platform for discussion and dialogue. Well, very briefly about education, definitely Azerbaijan continues its efforts to make climate change part of the curriculum. But our main initiative within this scope, have tried to make sure that it's not only national agenda but also the global agenda to introduce first time the assessment of climate literacy or environmental literacy as a part of international assessment projects namely PISA.

Together with OECD and UNESCO we came up with a new assessment framework for environmental literacy. For very, again, description of the measurement tools, it's not something as a separate measurement tool within PISA. As you know, PISA measures reading, mathematics, and science. So on top of these three domains, the suggestion is to measure environmental literacy as a result of the different type action taken by different governments, by different ministries of education.

The process will continue up until 2029, so you can call it from COP 29 to PISA 29 for the next five years and I do believe the results of the first measurement will be available by 2030 December. So we do hope that many countries will join this initiative and will have first time evidence-based results of green education in different countries. Because so far, there are a lot of discussions, there are a lot of good practices and lessons learned, but we don't have any data-driven or any data-oriented results which can be comparable across the countries or to the different years.

And the second initiative, which today I think we are very much excited to get to know the QS university ranking, the next sustainability ranking of the universities for next year. It will be announced in Green Zone at 7 PM can become greener and this ranking definitely gives a lot of insights about the different approaches, different indicators and different type of methodologies to measure sustainability within higher education institutions," he noted.