At 2026’s World Environment Day (5 June), the United Nations will mark the occasion by issuing another global call for climate action.

Social media campaigns featuring #NowForClimate and #WorldEnvironmentDay will also see the Day’s hosts, the Republic of Azerbaijan, leading with communications centred on:

“The planet doesn’t argue. It doesn’t negotiate. It sends signals — rising seas, raging wildfires, heatwaves, melting glaciers. “We said 1.5°C was the limit. We are crossing it.”

The timing and tone of this call from the hosts of the presidency of ‘COP29’ (November 2024) and the day’s primary sponsor, the United Nations Environment Programme, are important to educators for several reasons.

First, there’s many calls for climate action. However, some are more visible than others, and not all are made by those deeply committed to continuing fossil fuel-based economies.

Two weeks earlier, for example, the United Nations voted on a July 2025 ruling from its principal judicial body, the International Court of Justice, regarding the obligations of States in respect of climate change. (Some of the usual suspects objected.)

Vanuatu - a Pacific island nation that has both a long history of calling for multilateral climate action while seeing few concrete steps forward via the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (the aforementioned climate COPs) - saw the UN’s General Assembly adopt its resolution on 20 May, based on the Court’s ruling.

The resolution called on “all UN Member States to take all possible steps to avoid causing significant damage to the climate and environment, including emissions produced within their borders, and to follow through on their existing climate pledges under the Paris Agreement.” It urges governments to “cooperate in good faith and continuously coordinate efforts to tackle climate change globally and ensure that climate policies safeguard the rights to life, health, and an adequate standard of living.”

Illustrations of what such cooperation might look like made the news in late April. During the inaugural conference of the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, held in Santa Marta, Colombia, the event actually surfaced a sense of the growing frustration with the UN’s climate summits (COP meetings).

The charge: “Consensus rules have often allowed fossil fuel interests to block direct discussion of the need to phase out coal, oil and gas”.

Observers noted a difference in proceedings too. As reported in The Guardian, Fatima Eisam-Eldeen, from the University of Barcelona and Leave It in the Ground Initiative, said:

“For too long, multilateral climate forums have felt like rooms where everyone speaks, but no one understands. Santa Marta broke that pattern. It spoke the language of hope.”

Second, these events matter to educators because of what it says about ‘the educated’, and the ‘doing’ and ‘being’ of education, particularly when hope might be hard to find, particularly in what is talked about in schools.

Critical media literacy, for example, is widely seen as essential to democracy and an informed citizenry. No one wants the alternative: An ignorant citizenry, right? So it matters who gets to speak about what on climate change topics, and how this in engaged across the contributors to, and recipients of, the socio-political spectrum.

Put differently, how a society prepares its young people for a rapidly changing world is key, and we cannot ignore the importance of equipping students with skills in recognising disinformation and bias, but also in imagining what kinds of jobs they may seek, and the world they are told they will likely inherit.

If we don’t address these matters, critics argue we will fail to offer ‘a climate-savvy curriculum of tomorrow’.

This claim is not new. A version of it appears most years when educators reflect on World Environment Day, including what these events signal as priorities that wax and wane over the decades.

In 2004, in “Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment and the Human Prospect”, for example, David Orr reflected on where ‘the vandals of the Earth’ are educated, and to what ends.

Twenty years ago, Orr called out institutions of higher education for not addressing that “more of the same kind of education will only compound our problems” (p.8). He introduced his collection of essays (p.5) with the following:

“Education is not widely regarded as a problem, although the lack of it is. The conventional wisdom holds that all education is good, and the more of it one has, the better. The essays in Part one challenge this view from an ecological perspective. The truth is that without significant precautions, education can equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the Earth. If one listens carefully, it may even be possible to hear the Creation groan every year in late May when another batch of smart, degree-holding, but ecologically illiterate, Homo sapiens who are eager to succeed are launched into the biosphere. The essays in Part one, accordingly, address the problem of education rather than problems in education. They are not a call to tinker with minutiae, but a call to deeper change.”

We use an extended extract here because it touches on many points pertinent to 2026’s World Environment Day. A decade earlier, in his E.F. Schumacher Lecture, Orr (1992) elaborated:

“More of the same kind of education that enabled us to industrialize the earth can only make things worse. This needs to be stated strongly to underscore the fact that the environmental crisis is not primarily the work of the ignorant and uneducated; rather, it is that of so-called well-educated people who, in Gary Snyder’s words in The Practice of the Wild, “make unimaginably large sums of money, people impeccably groomed, excellently educated at the best universities—male and female alike—eating fine foods and reading classy literature, while orchestrating the investment and legislation that ruin the world.” These are people who have been educated to think that human domination of nature is our rightful destiny.”

He added:

“I am not making an argument against education but rather an argument for the kind of education that prepares people for lives and livelihoods suited to a planet with a biosphere that operates by the laws of ecology and thermodynamics.”

Contemporary versions of these arguments have been offered by many others, including Stuart Tannock (2025). Tannock observes such calls to action seldom engage with the themes raised by the ‘degrowth’ movement though, or underscore the “importance of using education to foster collective, structural responses and not just individualized actions for tackling the global climate crisis” (p.454).

So why does there seem so little progress in graduating what we trust will be fewer ‘vandals’ of the Earth - or perhaps better - more ‘defenders’?

For Sofia Hiltner and colleagues (2024), a key consideration is the influence of the fossil fuel industry in higher education. Writing in WIREs Climate Change, their wide-ranging study documents a range of types of involvement, using examples drawn from universities in the USA, Canada, UK and Australia, including:

 · Fossil fuel industry personnel serving in university posts and governing boards.

· Academic personnel consulting for or serving on fossil fuel company boards.

· Fossil fuel industry sponsoring academic research centres.

· Fossil fuel industry endowing academic posts.

· Universities naming buildings after fossil fuel interests.

· Fossil fuel industry sponsoring scholarships, internships, and field trips for students.

· Fossil fuel industry sponsoring university lectures and conferences.

· Fossil fuel industry hosting career recruitment events for students.

· Fossil fuel industry advising course curricula and degree offerings.

· Universities participating in training services for fossil fuel industry personnel.

· Fossil fuel industry leasing university-owned land for fracking.

Exercises in critical media literacy that can easily double up with support for collective action might start with asking questions about this list and ‘partnerships’ – their prevalence, visibility, and consequences – as we know from our own institutions, Monash and Oxford. As Hiltner and colleagues note, climate obstruction appears to be shifting from outright denial of climate change to delaying or diluting climate action. Others note the greenwashing of academic accountability for research, education, infrastructure, communications and community links. It may be in uncritical embrace of AI, or by using ‘balanced scorecards’, rather than addressing what the raw entries in each ‘column’ might mean for the social license, reputation and legacy of that institution educating the next generation of graduates.

Orr closed his 1992 lecture with some sharp words about tokenism found in Schumacher’s (1975) “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered” (p.101):

“Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence. For it is our central convictions that are in disorder, and, as long as the present anti-metaphysical temper persists, the disorder will grow worse. Education, far from ranking as [our] greatest resource, will then be an agent of destruction ...”

We close our reflections on World Environment Day 2026 with another snippet: Schumacher’s words that precede Orr’s selection, on purpose:

"Our task – and the task of all education – is to understand the present world, the world in which we live and make our choices."

Unlike the planet and how that is positioned in the Day’s ‘comms strategy’, we can argue and negotiate. And universities can cultivate and award graduates who can do both. We can also make choices to do things differently - and be different - as citizens, students and educators, as well as in institutions.

Orr has often asked, what is education for? Critical literacy invites similar questions: Who is saying what education is for here, and why?

If the answer looks like an education of more of the same, then should we simply conclude we risk missing the point of yet another World Environment Day?

This article was co-authored with Isobel Talks, Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer at Oxford University.