Climate justice education in the aftermath of industry: bringing community knowledges to UNESCO’s Greening Curriculum Guidance

Recent attention to global climate justice has begun to infuse climate change education, including through UNESCO’s 2024 Greening Curriculum Guidance: Teaching and Learning for Climate Action. However, scholarly critiques of climate justice education reveal that regional climate injustices, such as those facing peripheral, deindustrial communities, remain marginal. This paper speaks into the gap by bringing theories and experiences of deindustrialism together with climate justice for two purposes. First, by learning from the knowledge and futurisms of a deindustrializing community in Cape Breton, it expands understandings of climate justice, tracing how deindustrial dynamics impact distributive, procedural, representational, intergenerational, and multispecies justice. Second, by diffracting deindustrial community knowledge with UNESCO’s Greening Curriculum Guidance, this paper explores education policy possibilities for climate justice, highlighting ways to engage in relational exploration of climate justice, validate the knowledge and agency of marginalized communities, and open possibilities for radically different modes of being.