Starting in September 2020, Italy will be the first country in the world to introduce mandatory climate-related lessons in state schools. Schools will be obliged to include 33 hours of lessons in their annual curriculum, which averages about one hour a week. There will also be a move to teach more traditional lessons such as physics, maths and geography through a sustainable development lens.
Italy’s education minister, Lorenzo Fioramonti, has said he wants the Italian education system to be the first in the world to place ‘the environment and society at the core of everything we learn in school’.