Summer break is now shaped as much by heat advisories and air-quality alerts as by vacation plans — this year’s World Cup among the events disrupted by wildfire smoke. Margaret Wang-Aghania has spent five years making the case that climate belongs inside subjects teachers already teach, not bolted on as an extra unit. In 2020, the former high school teacher co-founded SubjectToClimate , a free platform now used across every grade level and subject, backed by 100+ content partners. With a new AI-powered tool launching this fall and a Harvard course debuting in January, Margaret spoke with Ashoka's Simon Stumpf about what's working in classrooms, where the funding gap is, and what's next.

Simon Stumpf: Let’s start at the beginning – what did you see that others didn't?

Margaret Wang-Aghania: I'd always believed education could help solve the world's biggest challenges. But I'd also lived the other side of that: I was a high school social studies teacher, and it was hard enough just to teach what I was already required to teach. When someone tells a teacher, "you also need to cover this important topic" — on top of everything else — that doesn't work. Most teachers can't take it on. So the insight wasn't really about climate content itself. It was that if you want climate to actually reach students, it can't be one more thing added to a teacher's plate — it has to fit inside what they're already teaching. That's the whole premise of SubjectToClimate : our mission is to make it easy for every educator, at every grade level and in every subject, to teach climate change, justice, and action as part of their existing curriculum, not as an add-on.

Stumpf: You've said that integrating climate content can actually make a teacher's job easier, not harder. Can you give an example?

Wang-Aghania: I saw it in my own classroom. I taught high school economics, traditionally a very dry subject — graphs, supply-demand, externalities — and my students just weren’t engaged, they were memorizing. As a first-year teacher, I started asking them what they actually cared about, and whether or not they named "climate" explicitly, they were always worried about their own community, their environment. So we started looking at negative externalities differently. Take meat, for example: since they’re consuming it all the time, we traced the link from what's on their plate to carbon emissions — and suddenly they were passionate about graphs. We did a unit on government intervention — what can government do to shift behavior and protect the Earth — and my students campaigned on those ideas in their own school, debating taxes on production versus consumption. It was so cool to see them not just care about something, but actually grasp economics the way you'd use it in real life. That's when I started asking: how do we scale this?

Stumpf: Climate anxiety among young people is well documented. How do you help channel the passion without deepening fear?

Wang-Aghania: Surveys show the majority of students want to learn about climate — but the majority also believe humanity is doomed, and more than 80% report being anxious about it . A lot of that comes from how they're getting this information: through social media, in a way that's alarmist and doesn't explain causes or solutions. That's where school can be powerful. We train teachers not to hide the facts — the facts are scary — but to also help students do something about it, or learn what others are doing. Our framework has three parts: Inquire, Investigate, Inspire . Students first notice something around them and make an observation. Then they apply a skill — math, English, social studies — to that question. The Inspire piece is action-oriented: students either do something locally, even something small, or they explore what someone else has already done. That second piece gets underestimated. If every lesson demands the student personally solve the problem, that can feel intimidating and put the burden entirely on them. Action does lead to hope, but it's important to also show them they're not alone in this.

Stumpf: You've argued that education deserves more attention as a climate solution. Is that message landing with funders and policymakers?

Wang-Aghania: Very little climate finance or philanthropy goes toward climate education, even though plenty of organizations are doing great work in the space. It's talked about more now — climate plans increasingly include education, education plans increasingly include climate — but rarely at the core. Funders want immediate outcomes, and there's now more research linking education directly to emission reductions, which I hope signals this is under-invested. For any investment to endure, you need people, and school is where every young person builds the values they'll carry into adulthood.

The evidence backs this up. A San Jose State University study tracked emissions reductions after just one semester of climate education. North Carolina State University found middle schoolers shifted their parents' opinions and decisions. And our two-year study with the University of Washington, funded by the Spencer Foundation, tested our Inquire-Investigate-Inspire approach across science, art, English, and math classrooms — measuring knowledge, attitude, hope, agency, and behavioral intent. Even one unit doubled students' intent to engage in civic action, the long-term capacity that matters most.

Stumpf: How is AI changing what you do?

Wang-Aghania: We were using AI and machine learning before generative AI became a household topic, for our search algorithms across our database — and we recently launched a semantic-search resource finder so teachers can describe what they're teaching in plain language and get matched to a teaching resource. Our bigger Back to School project lets a teacher take any resource on our hub and click a button to adapt it to their specific city, pulling in local context — temperature for a lesson on heat, say — and surfacing local action opportunities; we have a prototype and are getting teacher feedback now. But AI is also an existential question for us: teachers have told us, why search for a resource if I can just generate something personalized myself? Part of our answer is hopefully integrating with tools they're already using, like Magic School, Diffit, or Claude for TeachersBrisk, so that whatever they generate still carries a sustainability lens. Another critical piece is reminding our community that the hundreds of lessons and units have been 1) created by classroom teachers just like them, who truly know what works inside the classroom, and 2) reviewed by experienced educators, who are experts on climate pedagogy. In addition, all our resources have been reviewed by a scientist and an educator. These are things that generative AI cannot do.

Stumpf: Where do you see this heading over the next five to ten years?

Wang-Aghania: Every young person growing up with this baked into their schooling, not treated as a niche add-on — and that will look different in every school and state. We've built nine state hubs so far, adapting our platform to each state's standards and local conditions, and I'd love to see that go international too — I'm hearing from more countries interested in this kind of work, so this could look like a Kenya hub or a Nigeria hub alongside our U.S. ones.

Alongside that practitioner work, I’m doing research at the Harvard Graduate School of Education with Fernando Reimers to make sure what we build stays grounded in evidence. We just published a book, Educating for a Climate Changed Future , pulling together what we've learned about what actually works in classrooms and how to scale climate education. And starting in January 2027, we'll be teaching a course at Harvard based on that research — so this isn't just a platform anymore, it's becoming a body of knowledge other educators and institutions can build on.

Margaret Wang-Aghania is an Ashoka Fellow . This interview is edited by Ashoka for length and clarity.