On 18 September 2020, the UN CC:Learn community celebrated the issuance of 100,000 certificates of course completion on our e-learning platform – a milestone for climate literacy worldwide. On this occasion, an event was held with high-level representatives from the United Nations, including the Deputy Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, Mr. Ovais Sarmad, the Deputy Secretary-General of WMO, Ms. Elena Manaenkova, the Executive Director of UNITAR, Mr. Nikhil Seth, as well as Ms. Janine Kuriger, Head of Division at the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Mr. Angus Mackay, Head of the UN CC:Learn Secretariat, Mr. Vincens Cótê and Ms. Cristina Rekakavas, respectively former and current coordinator of the UN CC:Learn programme.
As if this was not enough, we also had the attendance of more than 1,000 alumni from all over the world who joined via Zoom and Youtube. To close this celebration with a golden key, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, congratulated the UN CC:Learn Partnership and its community for this accomplishment. In his message, he also challenged our community to leverage climate literacy around the world to enable individuals, organizations, and societies to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
The task is now to scale up this effort and to build a global movement that can help us fulfill the promise of the Paris Agreement.”
Check out the full message sent by the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres.
Climate education is crucial for raising the ambition we need to address the existential threat of climate change.
I have been very encouraged to see the way that educators around the world are becoming more involved in climate change, in particular, because of the increasing role of youth in demanding greater attention to the crisis.
In that spirit, it gives me great pleasure to recognize the work of the One UN Climate Change Learning Partnership.
Since 2010, UN CC:Learn has been making the UN’s vast knowledge and expertise more easily available to people around the world, particularly in developing countries and countries in special circumstances. The Partnership has now reached a milestone: more than 100,000 learners have successfully completed a free online course — and more than 50 percent of those learners are women.
This adds 100,000 informed voices to the cause, with increased knowledge, skills and, above all, the motivation to advance climate science, sustainable infrastructure design, responsible investment and other key dimensions of this challenge. The task is now to scale up this effort and to build a global movement that can help us fulfill the promise of the Paris Agreement. The recently launched “United in Science 2020” report from the World Meteorological Organization is a further contribution, cataloging the crisis and ringing the alarm.
I congratulate the UN CC:Learn partnership on this achievement and thank the Government of Switzerland for its long-standing support for this important work.