Eco-Schools is the world's largest school-based sustainability programme, operating in 101 countries and engaging over 52,000 schools and nearly 14 million students. Run by the Foundation for Environmental Education, it equips schools with a structured, student-led framework for environmental learning and action, integrating sustainability into school life, curricula, and community engagement.
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Eco-Schools Programme
General Information
ISIG
A global student-led programme that helps schools embed sustainability and environmental action into their curricula, campus, and communities through a structured Seven Step methodology.
Operating in 101 countries through the Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE) and its national member organisations, the programme currently reaches over 52,000 schools and nearly 14 million students worldwide. Schools follow a seven-step change process — from establishing an Eco Committee to completing an environmental audit, developing an action plan, monitoring progress, linking to curricula, engaging the wider community, and creating an Eco Code — culminating in the award of an internationally recognised Green Flag.
While the programme addresses the full range of sustainability themes (energy, water, waste, biodiversity, climate change, and others), it has a growing and explicit focus on disaster risk reduction and climate resilience, most notably through the Eco-Schools Indian Ocean DRR Toolkit, a child-centred Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment guide developed in partnership with PIROI (French Red Cross) and the Indian Ocean Commission for schools across the South West Indian Ocean region.
Eco-Schools was launched in 1994 in Denmark, Germany, Greece, and the United Kingdom, initially with European Commission support, in response to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development and its call for the involvement of young people in local environmental action. When FEE became a global organisation in 2001, the programme expanded beyond Europe, and today it operates in 101 countries across all regions.
The programme was designed to address a persistent gap in formal education: sustainability challenges — including environmental risks, climate change, and disaster risk — were not consistently integrated into school curricula or translated into practical community action. Eco-Schools responds to this by giving schools a replicable, student-led process for identifying, analysing, and acting on local environmental and sustainability issues.
In the South West Indian Ocean specifically, the programme intersects directly with DRR. The region faces exceptionally high hazard exposure: an average of 13 tropical cyclones per year, regular flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and landslides. According to UNICEF, children represent 50–60% of those affected by disasters in this region. The Eco-Schools Indian Ocean DRR Toolkit was developed to address this risk by integrating a child-centred Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment (VCA) into the Eco-Schools framework, enabling schools in Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, Seychelles, and Tanzania to build DRR competencies as part of their broader sustainability work.
Hazard Type
Geographical Scope - Nuts
Population Size
Population Density
Needs Addressed
The Eco-Schools programme responds to several overlapping educational and risk-related gaps:
- Sustainability knowledge and behaviour change are absent or fragmented in many school curricula, leaving students without the tools to understand or respond to local environmental and climate challenges. The programme addresses this by embedding environmental learning in a structured, action-oriented school process rather than treating it as a standalone subject.
- In the Indian Ocean context, there is a specific and documented gap in child-centred DRR education. Disaster impacts disproportionately affect children, yet adult-led DRR programmes and school drills often fail to equip children with transferable knowledge and practical skills because they focus on rote instruction rather than participatory learning. The Eco-Schools VCA toolkit addresses this by enabling students to analyse hazards, assess vulnerabilities, and propose mitigation actions in and around their own schools and communities.
- Cross-cutting challenges include: schools operating in isolation without community linkage in DRR planning; disaster preparedness plans that do not incorporate children's perspectives; and limited integration of DRR into national school curricula.
The programme is designed for the general school-age population but explicitly addresses groups with heightened vulnerability. The Indian Ocean DRR Toolkit specifically targets children and youth (ages 8–18) as both a vulnerable group and as agents of change. It further acknowledges that within school communities, girls and boys may have different risk perceptions and experiences, and that younger children (under 10) require adapted activities. Families in disaster-prone rural and coastal communities, including those with limited formal education, are engaged as secondary beneficiaries through children's outreach and advocacy activities.
FEE sets the international framework and awards the Green Flag certification through national member organisations, each of which adapts and implements the programme within their national education system. Schools operate as the primary delivery unit, with school-level Eco Committees driving the process and involving teachers, students, parents, and community members.
In the Indian Ocean DRR Toolkit context, it was developed through a partnership between the Indian Ocean Commission (IOC), PIROI (French Red Cross), national Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies, and Ministries of Education across six countries. Implementation involves schools, national disaster risk management authorities, civil society, and community leaders.
The global programme builds baseline risk awareness and preparedness culture. In the Indian Ocean DRR context, the toolkit is designed to bring schools from basic awareness toward organised preparedness, specifically by integrating VCA findings into school contingency plans and linking to national disaster risk management authority frameworks.
The programme is deliberately low-infrastructure in design: the core Seven Step methodology requires only basic administrative, communication, and coordination capacity — printable materials, classroom space, and teacher facilitation. The Indian Ocean DRR Toolkit requires no digital infrastructure; activities are paper-based, participatory, and adapted for low-resource school environments.
To foster a whole-school culture of sustainability and DRR readiness; to translate risk awareness into practical action; and to empower students as legitimate actors and communicators in environmental and disaster risk governance.
Student-led Eco Committees; participatory environmental and sustainability audits; action planning workshops; community mapping; role play; hazard ranking exercises; seasonal calendars; stakeholder mapping; school community events; and family/community advocacy by students.
Within the school, students hold genuine decision-making influence: the Eco Committee sets priorities, designs actions, and owns the Eco Code. School leadership and teachers provide support and governance oversight. In the DRR Toolkit, children's VCA findings are designed to directly inform school emergency management plans, giving students a documented and institutional route for influencing school safety decisions. At community level, students act as advocates and communicators, influencing family and community preparedness behaviours. At policy level, the programme's alignment with Ministries of Education in several Indian Ocean states means that in those contexts, DRR-related curriculum materials and school plans validated through the Eco-Schools VCA process carry official institutional weight.
The programme builds long-term DRR and sustainability competencies by embedding them in repeated, structured school processes rather than one-off events. Students develop skills in environmental investigation, participatory analysis, stakeholder engagement, and community communication. Teachers gain facilitation skills. Schools build institutional memory through their Action Plans, monitoring records, and Green Flag documentation. In the Indian Ocean DRR context, the toolkit is explicitly designed to feed into school contingency plans and community DRR frameworks, embedding children's contributions in durable institutional structures.
Vulnerable Groups
Governance
Emergency Preparedness
Engagement Level
Empowerment Level
Implementation
The programme's defining innovation is its student-led, whole-school change model. Unlike traditional top-down environmental or DRR curricula, Eco-Schools positions students as the driving force, supported by a mixed school-community Eco Committee. This creates genuine ownership, transferable skills, and behaviour change that extends beyond the classroom into families and communities.
The Seven Step methodology provides a replicable and flexible scaffold that schools adapt to their own context, hazard profile, and community priorities. It is explicitly aligned to the four pillars of UNESCO's learning framework (learning to know, to do, to be, and to live together) and to Education for Sustainable Development principles.
The Indian Ocean DRR Toolkit is a notable innovation within this framework: it adapts the internationally recognised Red Cross/Red Crescent VCA methodology for use with children aged 8–18 in school settings. The toolkit uses participatory, creative, and game-based activities (body maps, community mapping, hazard ranking, seasonal calendars, role play, and stakeholder mapping) that are culturally contextualised for the Indian Ocean and are explicitly child-rights-based. It connects individual school DRR action to community, national, and regional frameworks, including the Sendai Framework and the Comprehensive School Safety Framework.
A further innovation is the Green Flag award system, which provides tangible external recognition and creates a continuous improvement incentive for schools worldwide.
The global Eco-Schools programme operates in the languages of its 101 national operators. The Indian Ocean DRR Toolkit is published in English and has complementary national resources in French (Réunion: Paré Pas Paré; Comoros manual), Malagasy (Madagascar), and Seychellois Creole (Seychelles: Rediksyon Risk Dezas). The toolkit explicitly acknowledges that activities should be adapted to local languages and contexts.
Global level: Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE), headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. FEE manages the international Eco-Schools framework, sets programme standards, coordinates national operators, and awards the Green Flag certification.
Indian Ocean DRR Toolkit: Developed jointly by the Indian Ocean Commission (IOC) through its ISLANDS initiative (funded by the European Union) and PIROI (Plateforme d'Intervention Régionale de l'Océan Indien / French Red Cross). Implementation in each country is anchored by the national Red Cross/Red Crescent Society in partnership with the relevant Ministry of Education.
Transferable implementing organisations in other contexts: national education authorities, local government education departments, national or regional Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies, environmental education NGOs, school networks, and international organisations with education mandates.
FEE has operated Eco-Schools for over 30 years and has an explicit climate resilience and school safety programme track. PIROI is a dedicated regional disaster risk management and climate adaptation platform with extensive DRR programming experience across the South West Indian Ocean. The IOC has supported over 15 DRR projects reaching more than 142,000 people since PIROI's creation. National Ministries of Education involved in the DRR Toolkit have established DRR curriculum integration in several countries (notably Madagascar and Mauritius).
The global programme involves FEE, its 79+ national member organisations, and approximately 52,000 participating schools with their students, teachers, school administrators, and parents. The wider community (local businesses, community groups, local authorities) is engaged through Step 6 of the Seven Steps.
For the Indian Ocean DRR Toolkit specifically: the Indian Ocean Commission (IOC), PIROI/French Red Cross, national Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies (Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, Réunion/France, Tanzania), national Ministries of Education, national disaster risk management authorities (listed by country in the toolkit), school Eco Committees, students, teachers, parents, and community members.
The global Eco-Schools programme follows the Seven Step methodology:
- Form an Eco Committee: Establish a representative school committee including students, teachers, non-teaching staff, and where possible parents and community members. Students play the primary role.
- Conduct a Sustainability/Environmental Audit: Review the school's environmental and social impact across all Eco-Schools themes. Results prioritise the issues to be addressed.
- Develop an Action Plan: Using audit results, create a SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely) action plan with tasks, responsibilities, and timelines.
- Monitor and Evaluate: Track progress against the Action Plan. Results are shared visibly across the school community.
- Link to Curriculum: Integrate the Eco-Schools process into formal teaching and learning across subjects.
- Inform and Involve the Wider Community: Extend the school's work to engage families, local organisations, local authorities, and businesses.
- Create an Eco Code: Develop a school-wide mission statement reflecting the school's sustainability commitments, displayed prominently.
For schools integrating the Indian Ocean DRR Toolkit, an additional process runs alongside or within this framework: conducting the child-centred VCA through 12 structured participatory activities (body mapping, community mapping, transect walk, hazard identification, seasonal calendar, disaster history profiling, hazard ranking, vulnerability assessment, identifying prevention/mitigation actions, stakeholder mapping, and evaluation), then feeding findings into school contingency plans and community DRR action.
After approximately two years of implementation, schools may apply for the Green Flag award, assessed by the national operator.
Human resources: Teacher facilitation capacity, school leadership engagement, and student Eco Committee time are the primary inputs. For the DRR Toolkit, two co-facilitators per VCA session and a note-taker are recommended.
Financial: School registration fees (variable by national operator; some national operators offer free access). Costs are primarily staff time, printing of materials, and basic event facilitation. The Indian Ocean DRR Toolkit requires no specialist equipment — activities use paper, markers, bean bags, and locally available materials.
Technical: No technology infrastructure required. The digital tools (FEE Academy online courses, programme website) supplement but do not replace the core in-school process.
A full Eco-Schools cycle typically takes one to two academic years from registration to Green Flag application. The programme is designed for continuous renewal: schools re-apply for Green Flag recognition on an ongoing basis, deepening their work over time. The Indian Ocean DRR Toolkit VCA process can be delivered in a single semester as a class or Eco Committee activity, with follow-up steps (integration into school plans, advocacy, community DRR action) extending over a full academic year or beyond.