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Louise Wilson, Climate Ambassador from the Environment Agency, dials in remotely to a year 10 geography class at Breckland High School (Suffolk) to talk about how her work in hydro-telemetry fits with the six-stages of geographical enquiry and fieldwork. This was followed by a ten-minute Q&A about her career.
Image credit: Kit Marie Rackley.
9 June 2026
Read time: 9mins
‘For geography teachers, Climate Ambassadors offer a way of widening influence across a school while resisting the pressure for climate action to become owned, and therefore contained, within one department.’
Kit Marie Rackley
Geography teachers and specialists are accustomed to working with complexity. We bring together physical and human systems, local places and global processes, quantitative data and lived experience. Increasingly, however, we are also being asked to help schools respond to climate anxiety, careers education, safeguarding responsibilities, and the Department for Education’s Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy, all within already crowded timetables. The challenge is rarely about willingness, but instead almost always about capacity.
This is where the Climate Ambassadors Programme is sometimes misunderstood. It can appear, at first glance, as another initiative to engage with or another responsibility likely to fall to geography by default. In practice, when used carefully, it can achieve the opposite. For geography teachers, Climate Ambassadors offer a way of widening influence across a school while resisting the pressure for climate action to become owned, and therefore contained, within one department.
Climate Ambassadors are trained, enhanced DBS‑checked volunteers drawn from a wide range of sectors, including environmental regulation, renewable energy, local government, conservation, engineering, water and planning. Their role is to support schools with climate and sustainability action in line with the DfE strategy. For geography teachers, their real value lies in the way they bring professional credibility, local knowledge and external capacity into schools without adding to curriculum load or assessment pressures.
Requesting a Climate Ambassador
Schools can request support from a Climate Ambassador by completing this form or by submitting a request through the STEM Learning platform.
A fully developed climate action plan is not required. Many schools begin with a broad sense that they want to connect curriculum, careers and sustainability more coherently, and the regional hub teams support the matching process from there.
Fern Catt (left), teacher at Carr Infant School (York), welcomed Climate Ambassador Charley Clayton (right) from the University of York, to support the school’s climate action plan and work with pupils on their vision for future biodiversity of the school site by harnessing their ‘Nature Love’. Credit: Carr Infant School.
Curriculum, careers and the Gatsby Benchmarks in practice
One of the persistent pressures faced by geography teachers is the assumption that careers education and sustainability sit outside core curriculum time. Climate Ambassadors can be particularly effective at dissolving this false separation by allowing careers learning to be embedded directly within existing geographical content.
At GA Conference 2025, during the Teachmeet, I shared an example from a year 10 GCSE geography lesson that illustrates this approach. The lesson focused on required curriculum content: the six stages of geographical enquiry, taught in preparation for fieldwork. The geography teaching happened first, in full. A Climate Ambassador from the Environment Agency then joined remotely and explained how her work in hydro‑telemetry and flood management mirrors those same stages of enquiry in professional practice. Students were given time to ask questions about her role and career pathway.
No curriculum time was lost, but students’ understanding of the purpose of geographical enquiry shifted. At the same time, the lesson contributed to several Gatsby Benchmarks, including linking curriculum learning to careers and providing encounters with employers and employees, with some contexts also supporting engagement with higher education. This kind of integrated approach reflects long‑standing GA thinking around professional pathways and careers education.
Climate action, safeguarding and teacher wellbeing
There is growing recognition that climate anxiety constitutes a safeguarding concern. Many young people carry persistent fears about environmental breakdown and future insecurity, often without structured opportunities to explore those concerns meaningfully. Geography classrooms are frequently where these conversations surface most clearly, placing both opportunity and emotional pressure on geography teachers.
Climate Ambassadors can help redistribute that load. By introducing trusted external adults who work with climate and environmental issues as part of their professional lives, schools can show students that climate challenges are being addressed collectively and practically. Some Climate Ambassadors are trained in whole‑school frameworks such as Unlock Holistic Climate Action, which explicitly link statutory requirements, wellbeing, safeguarding and meaningful sustainability practice.
Used in this way, ambassadors support geography teachers not only in curriculum delivery but also in establishing climate conversations grounded in agency rather than fear.
Geography’s connective role: convening rather than containing
Recent GA blogs have repeatedly highlighted geography’s capacity to act as a connective discipline, linking climate knowledge to lived experience, values and future pathways. Articles such as Why geography lessons are the key to climate and humanistic awareness and Leadership for sustainability and climate change emphasise geography’s role in helping young people navigate uncertainty rather than offering simplified answers. Climate Ambassadors strengthen this work by bringing professional narratives into those discussions, helping students understand how contested data, ethical tensions and imperfect decisions are handled beyond the classroom.
This connective role is particularly evident in work around reconnecting young people with place and nature, as explored in Geography’s capacity to reconnect young people with nature Parts 1 and Part 2.
That thinking aligns closely with the National Education Nature Park, also part of the DfE Sustainability Support Programme. The Nature Park supports habitat mapping as part of a national and community science effort, biodiversity enhancement on school sites, and the integration of learning about and through nature across the curriculum. Its resources, filterable by key stage and subject, allow geography teachers to embed nature‑based learning without positioning it as enrichment or an add‑on.
Climate Ambassadors add coherence by helping geography departments act as convenors of this work rather than its owners. Trained Ambassadors are already familiar with the National Education Nature Park and can work in partnership with regional NENP colleagues, supporting schools to navigate overlapping initiatives without placing coordination burdens on geography teachers. Ambassadors working with wildlife trusts, river and flood partnerships, or local planning teams can support students to interpret habitat maps, biodiversity data and land‑use decisions using core geographical concepts such as scale, systems and interdependence.
This collaboration also addresses questions raised in Spring clean your fieldwork, about what happens to data once it has been collected. Habitat mapping and biodiversity monitoring through the Nature Park create datasets that can be revisited and built upon over time. Climate Ambassadors help make that continuity visible by showing how similar data informs professional practice in conservation, environmental management and planning.
Influence without isolation
The most significant contribution Climate Ambassadors can make for geography teachers is the permission not to do everything alone. Geography departments do not need to own sustainability strategies or lead every initiative in order to shape them meaningfully. By convening conversations, modelling critical and hopeful engagement, and inviting others into curriculum spaces, geography can exert influence without absorbing unsustainable levels of responsibility.
Climate Ambassadors exist to support that approach. When used relationally rather than transactionally, they allow geography teachers to extend their impact across the school while remaining rooted in what geography already does best: helping young people make sense of a changing world, their place within it, and the possibilities for acting within it.
Written by Kit Marie Rackley, Climate Ambassadors East of England Regional Hub Manager based at the UEA Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and GA Consultant.
© Kit Marie Rackley, and Geographical Association, 2026
