Italy making climate change studies compulsory at schools

PanARMENIAN.Net - From next year, Italian school students in every grade will be required to study climate change and sustainability, in an attempt to position the country as a world leader in environmental education, CNN reports.

Education Minister Lorenzo Fioramonti, of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, said all public schools will include about 33 hours a year in their curricula to study issues linked to climate change.

The lessons will be built into existing civics classes, which will have an "environmentalist footprint" from September 2020, Vincenzo Cramarossa, Fioramonti's spokesman, told CNN.

"The idea is that the citizens of the future need to be ready for the climate emergency," Cramarossa said.

In addition, sustainable development will appear in more traditional subjects, such as geography, maths and physics, Cramarossa said.