Two teachers who met online in 2017 built climate education for students into a global movement now reaching 6.5 million learners across 183 countries.
Dr. Jennifer Williams and Koen Timmers had never met in person when they began collaborating from opposite sides of the world. Both had spent more than 20 years teaching, researching technology-enhanced learning, authoring books, and speaking at conferences on sustainability, and they were connected only through social media. In 2017, they asked a simple question: what if their combined expertise and networks could launch educational projects allowing students not just to learn about environmental issues, but to act on them?
That question led to a meeting in Brussels in 2018, where Williams and Timmers founded Take Action Global (TAG) and committed to mobilizing climate education for students on a global scale. By 2020, the organization went all-in on environmental education, expanding its team and reach to meet a moment when young people increasingly demanded real tools for climate action rather than abstract lessons.
The results since then reflect that sustained commitment. Climate education for students through Take Action Global now reaches 6.5 million students and teachers across 183 countries, working alongside partners including WWF, NASA, the United Nations, and the Jane Goodall Institute to deliver quality environmental learning experiences worldwide. The organization has set an ambitious target of empowering one billion students to take climate action by 2030.
At the center of this work is the Climate Action Project, a free six-week program that lets teachers and students across six continents connect virtually and collaborate to solve climate change. More than 5.3 million students across 173 countries have participated, exploring, brainstorming, discussing, and creating solutions before presenting their findings through weekly videos shared with peers worldwide.
Climate education through this project deliberately targets skills beyond environmental knowledge alone. Creativity, empathy, real-world problem-solving, collaboration, and critical thinking form the pedagogical backbone of each six-week cycle. Students learn both synchronously and asynchronously, watching peers’ videos from different countries and cultures to make learning feel authentic rather than theoretical. The program culminates each year in Climate Action Day, a live online event featuring interactions with world-renowned experts sharing their knowledge directly with participating classrooms.
Climate education for students deliberately targets creativity, empathy, real-world problem-solving, collaboration, and critical thinking through each six-week cycle, culminating in Climate Action Day, a live online event featuring world-renowned experts sharing knowledge directly with participating classrooms worldwide. Photo courtesy of Take Action Global.
Beyond the flagship project, Take Action Global operates Climate Action Schools, a designation and support structure helping entire educational institutions embed sustainability into their culture and curriculum rather than treating climate education for students as a single unit or elective. The organization also runs Coding for Climate, merging technology education with environmental problem-solving, recognizing that tomorrow’s climate solutions will increasingly depend on digital literacy alongside ecological understanding.
Supporting all these programs is the EarthProject app, which allows students, teachers, and the broader movement to track collective impact in real time. Rather than treating environmental action as invisible or abstract, the app gives young people tangible evidence that their individual contributions, when aggregated across millions of participants, produce measurable results.
Climate education for students remains free through Take Action Global’s core programs, reflecting the organization’s foundational commitment to accessibility. Its stated belief in climate education for all extends this principle explicitly, working to ensure access to information, ideas, and opportunities regardless of a school’s location, funding level, or resources. Since 2023, that commitment has helped grow the community from 3.4 million to 6.5 million students and teachers, nearly doubling reach in just a few years.
Partnerships with major scientific and cultural institutions lend credibility and depth to the curriculum. Collaboration with NASA brings space-based climate data into classrooms. Work with the Jane Goodall Institute connects students with decades of conservation science and field research. UN partnerships align classroom learning with global sustainability frameworks, helping students understand how local action connects to international climate goals.
What distinguishes climate education for students at Take Action Global from conventional environmental curricula is the emphasis on action over information alone. Students are not simply taught facts about rising temperatures or biodiversity loss. They are asked to identify problems in their own communities, design solutions, execute projects with measurable outcomes, and share their work with a global peer network spanning nearly every country on Earth.
This peer-to-peer model creates unexpected connections. A student researching drought solutions in one country might discover a Climate Action Project video from a peer in a different hemisphere facing a related challenge, sparking collaboration across cultural and geographic divides that traditional classroom instruction rarely achieves. The organization’s resources, including a Climate Action Class Starter Kit and curated climate action booklist, help teachers who want to begin this work but need practical entry points.
As climate change accelerates and young people increasingly express anxiety about their environmental future, climate education for students offers something rare: agency. Rather than positioning students as passive recipients of a crisis inherited from previous generations, Take Action Global’s model treats them as capable problem-solvers already equipped to contribute meaningfully, provided they receive the right tools, community, and platform to act.
