Terra Mission: Life Terra's environmental package to teach students about climate action
Building a more resilient and healthier future goes by teaching the youngest generation how to take care of our planet. This is what LIFE Terra has been doing by engaging more than 35,000 schools in climate action around the world.
Environmental education has experienced a period of growth and increased focus, with the EU supporting initiatives that integrate sustainability into school curricula and training systems. The 2024 Education and Training Monitor showed that EU education systems are contributing to addressing the climate crisis, but some persistent challenges still need to be tackled.
Only 42.1% of students reported having a good opportunity to learn about sustainability in their schools, with one of the main concerns being the disconnection between knowledge and real action.
Terra Mission, LIFE TERRA’s environmental educational package, wants to fill this gap by providing an interactive programme that challenges students and teachers to learn but also to bring what they learned outside of the school and take action into their own hands.
The learning package, aimed at children 8-14, provides teachers with 140 interactive lessons on 8 sustainability-related themes: climate change, energy, waste, circular economy, water, agriculture, air and trees, fully customisable to adapt to school curricula.
Within the course of the LIFE TERRA project, Terra Mission engaged 35,115 classrooms worldwide, reaching an estimate of 421,380 primary and secondary school students, and significantly surpassing its original target of 14,000 classrooms by 2025.
Terra Mission is freely accessible on Gynzy’s platform, the developer of the package and one of Life Terra’s Consortium partners, and available in 7 languages (Dutch, English, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish).
A Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) was also developed by the EUN to guide teachers on how to use the package. The MOOC, which engaged 3,872 educators from 68 countries, remains open for self-paced learning.
Taking real and meaningful climate action
To encourage teachers to take action with their pupils, LIFE TERRA developed the “Life Terra Guide for School Plantings”, a step-by-step guide on how to organise a tree-planting event.
Planting trees is a great way to learn how to take care of the environment, connect outside of the classroom and apply their knowledge into real action. So far, 1,041 classes have organised 701 tree-planting events, creating a durable link between students and their surroundings.
