Are Sustainability & Climate Action Alike?

Written By Teacher: Elaine Makarevich

Elaine is a New Jersey educator with 30 years of teaching experience in grades K-6. The earth and the natural world have always been a focus of her life and throughout her career as her students learned critical lessons about their planet when visiting her indoor or outdoor classrooms.

Sustainability is a vital yet often misunderstood concept that goes beyond simply addressing climate change. Teaching about sustainability can be complex because it requires connecting environmental, economic, and social systems to show how they interact and depend on one another. Students may struggle to see how individual or community actions contribute to larger, long-term goals of sustainability. Resources like MIT’s explanation of what sustainability is and lessons like the Hawaiian Fishponds Sustainability Lesson and Civic Engagement Lesson: Green Schools Audit make these ideas more tangible. By combining traditional practices with actionable classroom projects like auditing school sustainability, we can help students understand the broader scope of sustainability while empowering them to take meaningful steps in their communities.

Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative

The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.

You might have heard the word “sustainability” in conversations about climate change—as in a “sustainable economy,” or a “sustainable energy system.” In the context of climate change, this usually means changing our energy, transportation and other systems so that they don’t contribute to warming the planet. But sustainability is a broader concept than just preventing climate change.

“What's so interesting about sustainability, and why I've built my career around it, is that it's complex,” says Julie Newman, MIT’s first Director of Sustainability. “It involves people and the environment, extraction, disposal, use—so it's really looking at the complexity of the world and how humans interact with it.” From an environmental perspective, sustainability is concerned with the resources we take from the Earth and how we use them, with an emphasis on not exhausting what the planet can supply.