The reality of rapid climate change, the challenges this brings and the catastrophes it will inevitably wreak, needs to be addressed urgently by business, government and social sectors through adequate and carefully-coordinated policy action. The main causal factors, however, involve a competitive global financial and political system addicted to limitless growth and consumption of the earth’s natural resources, in particular through the ongoing dependence on fossil fuels; and unending wars and conflicts that are a consequence of ginormous, vested economic interests and the compromising and capture of global governance processes and structures. The consequence of this is ever-failing diplomacy and insufficient political will and an unserious approach to setting or keeping climate action targets. The specific solutions and strategies that have to be implemented at sectoral level cannot wait simply for geopolitical and macroeconomic tectonics to drift magically in the right direction. A mobilised and engaged population, organised across all sectors of society to address the exigencies of climate change may be the only counter force that will ultimately be able to hold these macro interests in check and recast them to act in the interests of human security and sustainable ecosystems on a liveable planet. The education sector in various countries around the world, as well as regionally and internationally has been developing momentum in climate change education for some time. China and the U.K. implemented climate change education (CCE) in the 1970s, Demark and other Norther European countries adopted climate education in the 1990s along with the Dominican Republic and a number of other small Island States. Strong leads also came from Australia, Vietnam, in the early 2000 and the were subsequently followed by the US and Korea in 2007 & 2008. Japan started environmental education in the 1960s and has played a particularly prominent role in the last decade-and-a-half. Sustainable development received international recognition at the 1972 UN Conference the Human Environment help in Stockholm. The Rio Declaration adopted by 180 governments at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro twenty years later in 1992 adopted a voluntary action plan called Agenda 21, which intended to provide an agenda for local, national, regional, and global action into the 21st Century. UNESCO was tasked to lead Agenda 21’s Chapter 36 on Education, Awareness and Training and aimed to develop a new vision for education that would reorientate the sector towards sustainable development and establishing UNESCO’s catalytic role in promoting Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The United National declared a Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014); the subsequent 2030 Sustainable Development Goals drew substantially from these past processes. While Agenda 21 was unbinding, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an international treaty acknowledges climate change is a result of human activity; it provides the framework for ongoing climate change negotiations between national states. The Conference of the Parties (COP) is the leading decision-making body of the UNFCCC and is made up of representatives from 196 countries who are signatories on the treaty. The COP has met each year since 1995 to review the implementation of the Convention. Each COP builds on elaborates the decisions and resolutions adopted in the previous COPs. Better known agreements include the Kyoto Protocol adopted at COP3 in 1997, which aimed to limit greenhouse gases; COP21 in 2015 adopted the “Paris Agreement", which contained clear commitments to decarbonisation and ending the world’s reliance on fossil fuels; and at COP25 in Madrid in 2019, Mexico and Italy, largely in response to the strength of the student protests that year, committed to bold targets to strengthen climate change education in their respective countries. Strong critiques have emerged both of the whole notion of sustainable development and at the pace progress made towards meeting the targets agreed to in the successive COPs. A first is from a degrowth perspective; which argues that sustainable development is not itself sustainable and that global consumption needs to be radically reduced to avoid catastrophic climate change. A second is to be seen in the urgency and passion of the student-led climate strikes of 2019, significantly, but not entirely, inspired by Greta Thunberg. Thunberg declared that COP26 in Glasgow was all “Blah, blah, blah” and she declined to attend COP27 in Egypt. Her recently published ‘The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions’ is a call to action that asserts that capitalism and market economics are ‘terrible ideas’ for slowing climate change. One of the most striking things about the youth-led climate strikes is how ‘absurd’ most young people think it is that oil companies that are causing the climate crisis will have solutions for solving it in the first place, or, that they would ever have the will to implement any solutions they did find. The third critique emerges from small farmers, indigenous people’s movements and communities that have been forced to move because climate has become too erratic or too inhospitable for them to live. The UN's refugee agency (UNHCR) estimates that every year since 2008, roughly 21 million people are forcibly displaced by weather-related events – including floods, storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures. The climate crisis was the underlying cause of the Indian farmers’ huge protests from August 2020 until December 2021, when Modi’s government repealed the three contentious farm bills. These protests were driven by income insecurity that was a result of changing rainfall patterns and misguided government incentives that promoted the overuse of water. In the light of this urgent context, the upcoming CAPS Unlock meeting intends to set up a working group on the formation of a Central Asian Climate Education Coalition that will have at least five initial and urgent objectives: