Environmental Resilience, Climate and Sustainability

ABSTRACT

Teacher education curricula in climate-vulnerable, post-conflict nations remain largely disconnected from the environmental realities that graduates will confront. This paper advances a theoretically grounded framework for integrating climate resilience into pre-service teacher education, using Sierra Leone as an illustrative case. Drawing on curriculum reconceptualist theory, the ILO's holistic greening model for technical and vocational education, and emerging competency frameworks for teachers' green skills, we argue that curriculum reform in teacher education constitutes a form of climate infrastructure, a durable institutional investment that multiplies adaptation capacity across generations. We propose a three-tier framework: (1) epistemic integration of indigenous ecological knowledge and climate science; (2) pedagogical transformation toward place-based, experiential, and community-engaged green pedagogies; and (3) systemic alignment with national climate commitments, particularly Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). The paper identifies persistent gaps between Sierra Leone's robust climate policy architecture; including its updated NDC, National Climate Change Policy, and National Adaptation Plan and the absence of environmental competencies in teacher preparation programs. We contend that without explicit curriculum intervention, teachers remain under-equipped as agents of climate response, and national climate ambitions lack the human capacity for implementation. This work contributes to the discourse on education for sustainable development in fragile, low-resource contexts by positioning curriculum reform not as peripheral to climate policy, but as its necessary foundation.

Keywords: Curriculum Development; Teacher Education; Climate Resilience; Environmental Education; Green Pedagogy; Sierra Leone; Fragile States; Education For Sustainable Development (ESD)