A group of biodiversity researchers and conservation practitioners in the Philippines has teamed up with the country's Department of Education to produce a biodiversity toolkit that will be made available to teachers nationwide. This endeavour is one of the largest efforts to incorporate biodiversity and conservation in Philippine schools.

Across its more than 7,600 islands, the biodiversity of the Philippines is both rich and highly threatened, and the country is recognized as a biodiversity hotspot. The general low awareness about this biodiversity, however, compounds the threats to species and ecosystems, resulting in misguided policies and practices for natural resource management. Schools are not well equipped to teach about biodiversity, and teachers, especially non-biology subject teachers, have limited resources for this purpose.

To support teachers across the school curriculum, a new resource about the biodiversity of the Philippines was made publicly available in December 2021. Samot-Saring Buhay: A Toolkit on Philippine Biodiversity for Filipino primary and secondary school teachers provides educators with knowledge and resources to incorporate biodiversity into classroom lessons and discussions.

The toolkit provides an overview of biodiversity, the ecosystem services it provides, and the threats to species and ecosystems, using examples from the Philippines. It relates the relevance of biodiversity to Filipino culture, livelihoods, social welfare, disaster risk management, history and current affairs, to help educators explain and integrate the topic across subjects, from science to social studies and the arts. The toolkit draws on examples of conservation work from across the Philippine archipelago, featuring 150 profiles of Philippine species, 50 infographics, and a directory of organizations working on Philippine biodiversity research and conservation.

Filipino biodiversity researchers and conservation practitioners developed the toolkit in a partnership between the Biodiversity Conservation Society of the Philippines and the Department of Education. The toolkit is freely accessible to the more than 800,000 public and 300,000 private school teachers in primary and secondary schools in the country. Anyone interested in learning or teaching about the biodiversity of the Philippines is encouraged to download and use this resource, freely available from the Department of Education (deped.gov.ph/climate-change-education) and the Biodiversity Conservation Society of the Philippines (biodiversity.ph).