From May 31 to June 2, conferences with international exhibitors, round tables and practical workshops will be held in the City of Buenos Aires with the aim of debating and reflecting with experts on the current climate and environmental scenario and the role of education for sustainability.

It aims to provide a space that allows teachers, educators, researchers  to delve into the debates and current pedagogical challenges in the field of Environmental Education and promote greater knowledge of environmental problems in order to enrich their approach at school.

The Symposium is organized by the Undersecretary of Educational Technology and Sustainability and the General Directorate of Educational Planning , and has the support of the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI).

Environmental Education Context in Argentine

Since 2008, the City of Buenos Aires has adopted sustainability as a priority axis of its management. On the educational level, this commitment crystallized in 2010 with the creation of the Green Schools Program of the Ministry of Education, thus initiating an innovative policy on education for sustainability within the formal education system.

This current that puts sustainability in the focus of public policies, is accompanied by a series of laws that accompany the transformation that both the City and the rest of the country need to do in environmental matters. In 2005, the first Law No. 1687 on Environmental Education of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires was enacted , which promotes the incorporation of Environmental Education in the formal, non-formal and informal educational system.

For its part, the Comprehensive Environmental Education Law No. 27,621 for the Implementation of Environmental Education in the Argentine Republic, sanctioned in 2021 , constitutes a milestone in national educational regulations, since it lays the foundations to consolidate environmental education as a state policy. In its Art.1, the law establishes the right to comprehensive environmental education, while in its Art. 2, it urges the development of a National Environmental Education Strategy that reaches all formal and non-formal areas of education.

 Comprehensive Environmental Education Law

With the aim of promoting environmental education and incorporating, in compliance with current legislation, the new paradigms of sustainability in the fields of formal and non-formal education, the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development (MAyDS) and the Ministry of Education (ME), together with the consensus of the provinces through the Federal Council for the Environment (COFEMA) and the Federal Council for Education (CFE), designed the Comprehensive Environmental Education Law .

The initiative allows the implementation of a national public policy on environmental education , whose main instrument is the National Strategy for Comprehensive Environmental Education (ENEAI) .

The ENEAI is the strategic planning instrument and, at the same time, a permanent and concerted national public policy that reaches all informal, non-formal and formal areas of environmental education. It is aimed at all ages, groups and social sectors, in order to territorialize environmental education through actions in the short, medium and long term, through the deployment of jurisdictional strategies that allow to implement and adapt its implementation at the provincial level and of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, through Jurisdictional Strategies for Comprehensive Environmental Education (EJEAIs).