Grant blog published 07 May 2026

International Day of Education Grants

To celebrate International Day of Education in Botanic Gardens, and the recently launched Declaration of Intent on Climate Action Education, BGCI and the Korea National Arboretum provided a number of grants to BGCI members undertaking education activities aligned with the climate declaration.

This blog provides an overview of one of the projects funded – Sowing the future: Climate education through school agroecology in public educational institutions of Commune 4, Medellín District (Sembrando el futuro: Educación climática a través de la agroecología escolar en instituciones educativas públicas de la Comuna 4, Medellín).

The project

At the Jardín Botánico de Medellín – Joaquín Antonio Uribe, we believe that transformative environmental education must be rooted in the realities of the communities it serves. “Sembrando Futuro” (Sowing the Future) is a project designed to do exactly that: to bring climate change education and biodiversity into the everyday learning experience of students and teachers in the public schools of Comuna 4, one of Medellín’s most socioeconomically and environmentally vulnerable districts.

Comuna 4 faces multiple intersecting challenges: socioeconomic fragility, food insecurity, and the frontline impacts of climate change – including extreme rainfall events, landslides, and urban heat stress. It is in communities like this one that the connection between environmental science and lived reality is most urgent and most powerful. This is why we chose it as the focus of our education grant project.

Through the establishment of agroecological school gardens, we are transforming schoolyards into living laboratories. Approximately 100 students are now engaging directly with practices such as composting, native edible species conservation, and carbon capture through plants – concepts that move from the abstract to the tangible the moment a student’s hands touch the soil. Teachers are supported through a dedicated training programme: five educators from the participating school have received in-depth training in climate-linked pedagogies, exploring themes of native plants, carbon cycles, and urban agroecology. Alongside this, specially developed teaching materials allow these topics to be integrated across multiple subjects, including natural sciences, mathematics, social studies, and environmental education.

To date, three formative sessions have taken place with the school community, covering the uses of native plants, the principles of agroecology, and the role of the garden as an agent of change in the face of climate impact. The results have been encouraging and creative: each participant has constructed a terrarium – understood as a small-scale ecosystem – and produced artistic works using natural pigments extracted from plants growing in the garden. These hands-on experiences are not simply extracurricular; they are reshaping how students understand their relationship to the living world around them.

A technical site visit has also been carried out to identify the optimal location for a raised garden bed where edible and medicinal plants will be cultivated, further embedding the garden as a permanent, meaningful space in the life of the school.

Beyond the individual activities, the project is designed to foster a broader cultural shift: reconnecting urban communities with the land, building a sense of agency in the face of the climate crisis, and demonstrating that a school garden can be a space of knowledge, creativity, and collective transformation.

“Sembrando Futuro” is fully aligned with the Jardín Botánico de Medellín’s institutional mission of conservation, environmental education, and sustainability. As a MinCiencias-accredited Science Centre and member of BGCI with over 53 years of history, the Garden brings scientific rigour and community experience to this work – ensuring that every seed planted carries with it both ecological purpose and educational meaning.

We look forward to continuing to share the progress of this project and to inspiring other institutions to explore the potential of school gardens as engines of climate education.