World Environment Day Is Worth Celebrating. Make It Count.
World Environment Day is celebrated every year on 5 June.
Today, early childhood services across the world will plant, create and investigate environmental themes. Children will explore ideas they might not have before. Educators will start meaningful conversations.
So today is a great day to reflect. What has changed since you celebrated World Environment Day last year? More importantly, what would you like to have changed when this day rolls around again next year?
There's a pattern most educators recognise. A burst of sustainability activity around this time. Then the term moves on, other priorities fill the space, and by the time World Environment Day comes around again, the program is starting more or less from scratch.
What would it look like if sustainability wasn't a collection of ad hoc experiences, but woven through everything your service does? Through how educators ask questions, children return to the same investigations across seasons, the shared language your community develops, and the sustainability culture you build together.
An activity begins and ends. A sustainability culture deepens over time.
Why the early years are the right place for this
You already know the early years matter for sustainability. What the research adds is the understanding of scale.
Between birth and age eight, children are building the foundational architecture that shapes their capacities for the rest of their lives. Over one million neural connections form every second. The experiences children have, the relationships they form, and the environments they explore are the crucial contexts for their development.
During that same window, children are forming their fundamental relationship with the natural world. Research across multiple studies identifies early and middle childhood as the critical period for developing nature connectedness. Decades of research confirm that childhood experiences with nature are among the strongest predictors of adult sustainability attitudes and behaviours. Adults who take action for sustainable futures, who make choices that reflect genuine care for the living world, and who build careers oriented toward sustainability almost invariably had significant direct experiences with nature during childhood.
(Source: The First 2000 Days podcast series, PSC - Listen here)
This means your practice helps to shape children’s relationship with the living world. Not the events you highlight on the calendar.
Celebrate what you have already built
If your team has been working to embed sustainability into your program and practice, today is worth pausing to acknowledge what has shifted. More than displays on your wall, what has actually changed in how you think and work with children and your peers?
Consider these questions.
Do educators in your service understand your immediate place, its connections, its living systems, and its stories, as the starting point for sustainability learning?
How regularly are children’s voices shaping the direction of sustainability investigations, rather than them being largely predetermined by adults?
Sustainability carried by one person is fragile. Sustainability held by a whole team becomes culture. Is your team there yet?
What the journey looks like from here
Our 2025 Sustainability Snapshot, drawn from surveys and community polls across more than 200 Australian early childhood educators, found that 87.5% of services report minimal impact from the EYLF 2.0 Sustainability Principle more than twenty months after its introduction. This is not because educators don’t care, but because changing the culture of a place takes time, resources, and a commitment to working together. Moving from policy to practice is not automatic.
Whether your service is part of the 87.5% or it's further along, today provides a good opportunity to decide how your sustainability journey will look different next year.
A place to start
Bring these conversation starters to your next team meeting.
What is one thing we have shifted in our practice this year that we are genuinely proud of?
Where do we already see children thinking in ways that connect to sustainability, and are we recognising it when it happens?
What is one thing our team could do differently next term that would deepen sustainability understanding across our program?
Our mission
At Project Sustainability Collective, we work with early childhood services to cultivate the conditions in which children and educators develop the knowledge, skills, values, and agency to co-create sustainable futures, starting now.
What happens between an educator and a child during the first 2000 days shapes how children see the world and understand their place in it. That is where identity as stewards of place begins. There is a ripple effect as those children carry what they have experienced forward, families are drawn in and communities shift.
That ripple begins with you.
“It’s given our team clarity and momentum. Without it, we would still be stuck in small-impact pathways, unsure of how to move forward.”
— Iunita Amaru, Centre Manager, Heritage College Early Learning Centre Narre Warren South
If you are ready to understand where your service actually stands and what the next step looks like for your specific team, we offer a free Sustainability Practice Assessment. A conversation on Zoom, followed by a written report with insightful observations and practical recommendations.
Book your free Sustainability Practice Assessment here.
If education is not for sustainability, what is it for?
