The Ground Beneath Climate Education: How Relationships, Place, and Practice Shape Climate Resilience

In this week’s post, we hear from the indigenous women leaders from Gilgit-Baltistan that social-emotional connection with nature was a way of life, however formal education did not pay attention to it.  

In the high mountain valleys of Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan, glaciers are melting, rivers are changing course, and communities are facing increasing uncertainty. Yet this uncertainty is not new here. For generations, people here have held particular ways of being with land, animals, elders, and each other; ways that have carried environmental knowledge across time and shaped individuals who know how to care, endure loss, and rebuild together. But now, climate change and an education system that pulls children away from the practices that hold them are testing these ways of being.

What does this have to do with Social-Emotional Learning in climate education? A great deal. The capacities SEL aims to nurture: empathy, emotional regulation, agency, hope do not form in isolation. They form through practices that hold a child inside their community, their land, their elders, their seasons. When those practices are pulled away, SEL is being asked to grow these capacities without a ground.

For the past year, we at IEI Pakistan have been working through Saheli First Responders, a programme that builds indigenous women leaders, called Saheli Leaders, from seven districts across the Gilgit-Baltistan region, to surface and build on their communities’ knowledge for climate adaptation and resilience. As part of this work, the Saheli Leaders explored how their communities care for themselves, one another, and the environment. What they surfaced were environmental terms in local languages, stories shared by elders, and the everyday practices of daily life. What runs through all of these are ways people relate to land, water, animals, seasons, and one another. We looked across these relationships and named the values they carry. Eight emerged: attunement, the dignity of the body, reciprocity, an ethics of taking, interdependence as identity, holding grief as communal architecture, joy as structured practice, and releasing control.

These values live across culture, ritual, identity, and daily practice. Here are a few examples of what this looks like.

• Juniper trees grow across these mountains, but it is not just a plant. It is embroidered onto the traditional cap for women, as a symbol of life and longevity. Its leaves are burned to cleanse homes of odor and illness. Attunement moves the tree from mountain into material culture and ritual, and the relationship with it becomes part of how an individual and community understand their identity. 
• Rajaki, the collective volunteer practice of repairing irrigation channels at the start of the farming season, which unites people around their shared reliance on water. It teaches reciprocity and ethics of consumption because no household can manage the channel alone.
•  Bophou, the seed sowing festival, brings community together in joy to mark the seasonal rhythms. Collective prayers before cultivation carry another message: growing food is not solely an individual achievement, nor is the land entirely under human control. 

These values also carry generations of adaptation to climate variability. Releasing control was not invented for the climate crisis, but it is what carries people through disaster and displacement. When grief is held communally, no one has to face the loss of home, land, and familiar places alone. This is not merely tradition, nor folklore. It is knowledge, tested and refined through centuries of living in this specific place.

A child learns to bear grief by watching the whole village bring meals for five days after a death. They learn reciprocity by joining the adults at Rajaki, by feeling what it means when everyone shows up because everyone must. They learn attentiveness by being made to notice the water, the crops, the animals, the people around them who might need something today. Emotional awareness needs somewhere to point. It is these relationships that give it direction. Indigenous scholarship has been making this argument for decades. Gregory Cajete (1994) writes about Indigenous education as something that emerges from relationships with community, the natural world, spiritual life, and the places people inhabit. The values identified through our work describe how these relationships are lived in Gilgit-Baltistan.

Formal education, as it operates today, works against this. It produces three specific severances. It severs learning from land, treating the mountain outside the classroom as scenery rather than teacher. It severs children from elders, parents, farmers, herders,  the people who hold irreplaceable knowledge of the child’s own environment. And it severs learning from the reality a child is actually living, offering knowledge that has no relation to what the child is inside. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) has shown how colonial knowledge systems privilege what is written, institutionalised, and academically validated, while treating Indigenous knowledge as culture rather than knowledge. Marie Battiste (2002) has traced how formal schooling has systematically interrupted the transmission of Indigenous knowledge from elders to children, replacing land-based and community-based learning with classroom instruction that treats these older forms as supplementary at best.

You can see this in a classroom in Gilgit-Baltistan. A child studies the water cycle in a textbook without ever tracing the water that moves from the glacier into the channel that irrigates their village. They may learn about conservation without joining the ancestral practice of Rajaki that keeps the water flowing. The elders who hold generations of environmental knowledge, passed to them by their own elders and refined through their own lifetimes, are not invited in. What they carry is a form of environmental science that formal education does not recognise, and what it does recognise does not include what the child already lives inside.

There is another disconnect. Climate education is being built for learners who face climate change as a future threat. Children in Gilgit-Baltistan are already inside it. They have heard the blast that comes before a glacial lake outburst flood. They have felt their homes shake. They have watched roads and settlements vanish. Some have been displaced more than once.

These frontline learners need more than climate science. They need help understanding fear. They need to live with uncertainty that does not resolve, and to hold grief that does not either. They need some sense of agency when the conditions around them do not offer easy control. Their emotional needs cannot be treated as a small adjustment to a curriculum designed for children learning about climate through textbooks and media. Recent reviews of climate change education have begun to name this gap, noting the neglect of disaster risk reduction and the overlooking of community-held knowledge in Global South contexts (Ojo, 2026).

Our work of naming these values, together with the Saheli Leaders, is one attempt to make this relational infrastructure legible to climate education, and to begin reversing the severances formal education has produced. Once an indigenous practice has been named as a value, three things become possible. It becomes visible as knowledge to people outside the community that holds it. The principle can travel even when the practice cannot. The practice also becomes pedagogically usable: an educator who recognises reciprocity as a value can design for it in their own context, weave it into how a learning sequence unfolds, and ask whether their school’s relationship with its community embodies or undermines what is being taught. And the practice becomes politically accountable. Its absence from formal education becomes visible as a choice. A school that does not hold grief can now be asked why, and what it would take to hold it.

Climate education cannot build resilience through knowledge and isolated skills alone. It must focus on the relationships that enable people to notice, care, respond, and rebuild. In Gilgit-Baltistan, many of those relationships still exist, along with the values through which they are practised. Whether education will keep pulling children away from them, or find ways to bring them into learning itself, is the question I want to leave with you.

Reference

Cajete, G. (1994) Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education. Skyland, NC: Kivakí Press.

Smith, L.T. (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.

Battiste, M. (2002) Indigenous Knowledge and Pedagogy in First Nations Education: A Literature Review with Recommendations. Ottawa: National Working Group on Education, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada.

Ojo, E. (2026) ‘Mainstreaming climate change in school curricula: critical review of pedagogy, policy and Global South perspectives’, Cogent Education

Author: 

Marvi Soomro is Founder of Innovate Educate Inspire Pakistan, a grassroots feminist organisation in Gilgit-Baltistan. She leads the Saheli Movement, building girls’ and young women’s collective power through education, feminist technology, organising and locally led climate action.

You can write to her at marvsoomro@gmail.com or learn more about her work at www.ieipakistan.com