The TEK Pulse

Understanding Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Plain English

The TEK Pulse is Beating Fast

Traditional Ecological Knowledge is the accumulated, place-based understanding that Indigenous peoples and local communities have built up and passed down over generations: how ecosystems behave, when species move, how to manage land, water and fire, and which plants heal. It is tested by long observation and real consequence, and bodies from IPBES and the FAO to the IPCC now recognise it as serious scientific evidence. When tackling the 169 SDG targets, TEK can potentially move the needle of understanding and action.

Wouldn't it be great to see all 169 SDG targets in one place, tell where the evidence is genuinely strong from where it is thin, and separate what is recognised from what is actually running? Well, now you can, with the TEK Traditional Ecological Knowledge Pulse.

Where traditional ecological knowledge moves the needle.

All 169 targets, read for how strongly Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous and local knowledge bear on each one, and how much that knowledge is drawn on today. Click any target for its source-anchored snapshot. Where relevance is strong but integration is overlooked, there is an opening.

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1.The Proposition

Europe faces biodiversity loss, climate disruption and rising pressure on natural systems. That puts a practical question in front of schools. How do we move environmental education beyond learning about problems and towards developing the competence to respond to them?

The European Commission's GreenComp framework offers one answer. Published in 2022 by the Commission's Joint Research Centre, it sets out the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that make up sustainability competence, organised into four areas and twelve competences (Bianchi, Pisiotis and Cabrera Giraldez, 2022).

GreenComp is a competence framework. It describes what learners should develop. It does not prescribe a single way of teaching those competences, and that is deliberate. The framework is written as a shared reference for designing learning, not as a curriculum.

That open space is where place-based knowledge, including Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), can contribute. The ecologist Fikret Berkes describes TEK as a cumulative body of knowledge, practice and belief, built up through experience and passed down across generations, concerning the relationships between living beings, including people, and their environment (Berkes, 1999). It is diverse, locally grounded and shaped by particular cultures, ecosystems and histories. It is not a single tradition, and it belongs to no framework.

The phrase place-based comes from place-based education, an approach set out by the educator David Sobel that roots learning in the local environment, community and culture rather than in abstract or distant examples (Sobel, 2004). In this paper, place-based knowledge is used as an umbrella term. It includes TEK, and also local ecological knowledge, local history and community observation, which are not always TEK. Keeping the wider term makes clear that some of the connections below draw on Indigenous or traditional knowledge, while others rest on local records or scientific evidence.

Used carefully, TEK gives students concrete contexts in which to practise sustainability competences. They can examine how people have observed ecosystems, managed shared resources, responded to environmental change and built long relationships with particular places. The relationship can be set out as a simple sequence.

1GreenCompDefines the competences students need.
2Learning ContextThe local environment and its culture.
3TEK and Place-Based KnowledgeKnowledge, observation and practice.
4Learning ExperienceClassroom, field and community.
5ActionIndividual and collective response.

GreenComp provides the educational structure. TEK and other place-based knowledge provide meaningful contexts through which students practise those competences.

2.Why Bring Them Together?

GreenComp gives educators a common language for sustainability competence, but students can learn the definitions of biodiversity, systems thinking or intergenerational fairness without seeing how those ideas work in a particular landscape or community.

Place-based knowledge changes the starting point. Instead of asking only what sustainability is, students can ask a set of grounded questions.

How has this place changed?

What did people once observe here?

What can we learn from those observations?

What evidence supports them?

What should we do differently now?

The relationship also works in the other direction. GreenComp gives students a contemporary framework for examining traditional and place-based knowledge critically, alongside scientific evidence, historical records and other sources, without treating any one source as automatically more reliable. The aim is integration, not substitution.

3.The Four GreenComp Areas

The four areas, with their place-based connections and learning emphasis.
Area	GreenComp focus	TEK and place-based connection	Learning emphasis
1. Embodying Sustainability Values	Values, fairness and respect for nature	Relationships with place, intergenerational knowledge and ecological responsibility	How we relate to the natural world
2. Embracing Complexity in Sustainability	Systems, critical thinking and problem framing	Holistic observation, multiple knowledge systems and historical context	How we understand environmental problems
3. Envisioning Sustainable Futures	Futures, adaptability and exploratory thinking	Ecological memory, resilience, observation and adaptation	How we imagine and prepare for change
4. Acting for Sustainability	Agency, collective action and individual initiative	Stewardship, community resource management and responsible use	How we turn understanding into action

Area 1Embodying Sustainability Values

Sustainability begins with how we value people, places and the natural world. The first area asks students to examine the values that shape their relationship with sustainability. A TEK-informed approach can show how particular communities understand responsibility, reciprocity, relationships with nature and obligations to future generations. These examples should always be presented in their cultural and geographical context, not as universal Indigenous principles.

1.1 Valuing Sustainability

Place-based connection: ecological relationships and place-based worldviews.

Students examine how different cultures understand the relationship between people and the natural world.

Classroom activity Ecosystem Council

Students investigate a proposed change to a local environment, such as developing a wetland. Different groups represent residents, developers, local authorities and the ecological system itself. The students speaking for the ecosystem must use evidence to explain the likely consequences for water, soil, plants and wildlife.

Field activity Sit-Spot Journal

Students choose a small area of the school grounds or a nearby public space and return to it regularly. They record changes in vegetation, insects, weather, soil and other observable features. The aim is sustained observation rather than collecting specimens.

1.2 Supporting Fairness

Place-based connection: intergenerational responsibility.

Some Indigenous traditions place particular weight on obligations to future generations. The Seven Generations principle is rooted in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy and its Great Law of Peace, the oral constitution of the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga and Seneca nations. The single sentence about acting for the seventh generation, often quoted in sustainability writing, does not appear word for word in recorded versions of the Great Law, so it is more accurate to attribute the idea to the tradition than to present it as a direct quotation. Where the principle is used in class, its specific origin should be named rather than described as a general TEK idea.

Classroom activity The 150-Year Town Hall

Students examine a proposed resource-management decision. Each group considers its consequences over a different time horizon, and one group represents people living roughly 150 years in the future. Students then explain which decisions remain defensible when their consequences are weighed across several generations.

Field and community activity Seed Heritage Project

Students investigate locally significant crop varieties with a school garden, a farmer, a seed organisation or a community knowledge holder. They document:

where the variety originated;
how it was traditionally cultivated;
why it was valued;
how environmental conditions affected it;
whether it remains in use today.

The activity links biodiversity with cultural and intergenerational knowledge.

1.3 Promoting Nature

Place-based connection: relationships between people and living systems.

Students explore how language, stories, observation and cultural practices shape the way people see plants, animals and landscapes.

Classroom activity Biodiversity Through Oral History

Students interview older residents, farmers or other local knowledge holders about the species and conditions they remember from earlier decades, then compare those accounts with ecological records and current observations. There is a sound scientific reason to take such testimony seriously. In 1995 the fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly named the shifting baseline syndrome: each generation tends to treat the environment it grew up with as normal, so long-term decline is hidden as the reference point quietly resets downward (Pauly, 1995). Oral history is one way to recover the earlier baseline, which makes this activity evidence-gathering rather than nostalgia.

Field activity Micro-Habitat Restoration

Students identify a small area of the school grounds where biodiversity could be improved. They research locally appropriate species and design a modest habitat project, such as a pollinator area or a native planting zone.

Area 2Embracing Complexity in Sustainability

Environmental problems rarely have a single cause or a single solution. The second area builds students' ability to understand relationships, weigh evidence and examine the assumptions behind environmental decisions. TEK can contribute historical observations, local ecological knowledge and other ways of understanding how humans and ecosystems interact. It should be examined alongside other evidence, not treated as automatically more accurate than scientific evidence.

2.1 Systems Thinking

Place-based connection: socio-ecological relationships.

Students examine how environmental, social and economic systems interact.

Classroom activity Trophic Cascade Web

Students build a physical network connecting water, soil, plants, animals, human activity and economic activity. Removing or changing one element lets them trace the consequences through the whole system.

Field activity Catchment Mapping

After rainfall, students map how water moves through their local environment, identifying impermeable surfaces, drainage routes, areas of natural absorption, flooding points, vegetation and human interventions. They then compare the current landscape with its historical development.

2.2 Critical Thinking

Place-based connection: Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk).

Two-Eyed Seeing was brought into academic work by Mi'kmaw Elders Albert and Murdena Marshall, together with Dr Cheryl Bartlett, at Cape Breton University in Unama'ki (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia). Elder Albert Marshall describes it as learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of Western ways of knowing, and using both eyes together. It offers a clear frame for considering how different knowledge systems can each bring their own strengths to the same question.

Classroom activity Dual-Perspective Investigation

Students investigate a local water-quality question, comparing scientific measurements with historical and local observations.

Scientific evidence	Local knowledge
pH	Changes in water appearance
Nitrate levels	Changes in aquatic vegetation
Microplastics	Changes in fish populations
Temperature	Seasonal observations

Students then assess where the two sources agree, where they differ and what further investigation is needed.

Field activity Ground-Truthing

Students use a map or digital model to predict biodiversity in a local area, then carry out a field survey and compare the prediction with what they find. The key question becomes: what did the model fail to see, and why?

2.3 Problem Framing

Place-based connection: cultural assumptions and historical causes.

Students examine how environmental problems are framed, and how different assumptions lead to different solutions.

Classroom activity The Root-Cause Iceberg

Students select an environmental problem and investigate what lies beneath the visible symptom, then compare linear and circular approaches to resource use.

VisiblePlastic waste.

SystemsProduction, consumption and infrastructure.

AssumptionsWhat we believe products are for, and how resources should be used.

Field activity Landscape Investigation

Students visit an altered landscape, document the visible environmental problems, and then reconstruct the decisions that produced the current conditions.

Area 3Envisioning Sustainable Futures

Students need the ability to imagine different futures and respond to uncertainty. The third area moves from understanding present systems towards considering possible ones. Traditional and place-based knowledge can supply historical records of environmental change, adaptation and resilience, which can then be tested against contemporary evidence and future scenarios. The shifting baseline syndrome described in Area 1 applies here too: without an honest picture of the past, students cannot judge how far a system has already changed or how much recovery is possible.

3.1 Futures Literacy

Place-based connection: historical ecological baselines.

Classroom activity 2076 Storyboard

Students design a sustainable future for their town or city in 2076, combining contemporary technology with place-based strategies for food, water, buildings, transport or resource use.

Field activity Phenology Calendar

Students track seasonal changes in their school environment, such as flowering, leaf emergence or insect activity. They compare current observations with historical records where these exist, and discuss how a changing climate could affect seasonal patterns.

3.2 Adaptability

Place-based connection: local resilience and adaptation.

Students investigate how communities have adapted to environmental pressure, identifying strategies such as crop diversity, resource sharing, water conservation, seasonal planning, redundancy and collective decision-making.

Classroom activity Climate Resilience Matrix

Students analyse a historical adaptation strategy and ask whether the underlying principle could work in a modern urban environment.

Field activity Resilient Species Survey

Students identify plants that survive with limited irrigation or maintenance. Rather than encouraging unsupervised foraging, they investigate the ecological characteristics of these species and consider what those reveal about resilience.

3.3 Exploratory Thinking

Place-based connection: place-based design and natural systems.

Students examine how buildings, landscapes and technologies have responded to local climate conditions.

Classroom activity Traditional Design, Modern Classroom

Students investigate approaches such as passive cooling, courtyards, shading, natural ventilation, thermal mass and earth-based construction, then redesign a modern classroom using these principles alongside current technology.

Field activity Natural Water Management

Where appropriate and under proper supervision, students investigate how vegetation, soil, stones and natural contours influence water movement and erosion. The emphasis is on observing natural processes and designing low-impact solutions, not on building structures that could be unsafe.

Area 4Acting for Sustainability

Competence becomes meaningful when students can apply it. The fourth area concerns agency, collaboration and personal responsibility. TEK can offer examples of stewardship, collective resource management and reciprocal relationships with resources. Again, specific practices should be attributed to their cultural context rather than presented as universal rules.

4.1 Political Agency

Place-based connection: local environmental stewardship.

Classroom activity Civic Proposal

Students investigate a real environmental decision affecting their community and prepare a short, evidence-based proposal for a local decision-maker. The proposal sets out the problem, the evidence, the affected groups, the environmental implications, the possible solutions and the students' recommendation.

Community activity Civic Presentation

Where appropriate, students present their findings to a school board, a local authority, a community organisation or another relevant body.

4.2 Collective Action

Place-based connection: community resource management.

This competence has a strong evidence base in the work of Elinor Ostrom, who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009 for showing that communities can manage shared resources sustainably without relying on either private ownership or top-down control. From hundreds of cases worldwide she identified eight design principles common to durable arrangements, among them clearly defined boundaries, rules that fit local conditions, collective decision-making, monitoring, graduated sanctions for overuse, and low-cost ways to resolve disputes (Ostrom, 1990). Many traditional resource-management systems contain their own versions of these principles. The simulation below lets students arrive at them through experience.

Classroom activity Commons Simulation

Students manage a shared resource through a simulation. They first operate under individual incentives, then redesign the rules collectively, introducing measures such as agreed limits, monitoring, shared responsibility, transparent information and consequences for overuse. They compare the outcomes of the two rounds.

Community activity Micro-Restoration

Students work with an appropriate local organisation on a small restoration project, such as native planting, habitat improvement or litter removal. The activity should have a defined ecological purpose rather than becoming general volunteering.

4.3 Individual Initiative

Place-based connection: reciprocity and responsible resource use.

The Honorable Harvest, set out by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), offers one way of thinking about respectful relationships with the living world: take only what you need, use everything you take, give thanks, and give back. Kimmerer is a botanist and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, one of the Anishinaabe peoples, and she presents the Honorable Harvest as a widely shared Indigenous ethic rather than a fixed set of rules. It should be taught with that attribution, not described as a universal TEK principle.

Classroom activity The Life of a Product

Students trace a product from raw materials through manufacturing, transport, use and disposal, identifying resource inputs, energy use, waste, environmental impacts, social considerations and opportunities for reuse or repair.

Field activity Materials and Making

Students investigate locally available renewable or reclaimed materials and explore how objects can be designed for durability, repair and reuse. Where natural materials are collected, this should follow local rules and ecological guidance.

4.GreenComp and TEK Lesson Matrix

A practical reference for educators working with students aged 11 to 16.
Area	Competence	Place-based connection	Example activity
1. Values	1.1 Valuing Sustainability	Ecological relationships	Ecosystem Council
	1.2 Supporting Fairness	Intergenerational responsibility	150-Year Town Hall
	1.3 Promoting Nature	Human and nature relationships	Biodiversity Oral History
2. Complexity	2.1 Systems Thinking	Socio-ecological systems	Trophic Cascade Web
	2.2 Critical Thinking	Two-Eyed Seeing	Dual-Perspective Investigation
	2.3 Problem Framing	Cultural and systemic causes	Root-Cause Iceberg
3. Futures	3.1 Futures Literacy	Historical ecological baselines	Phenology Calendar
	3.2 Adaptability	Local resilience	Climate Resilience Matrix
	3.3 Exploratory Thinking	Place-based design	Traditional Design, Modern Classroom
4. Action	4.1 Political Agency	Environmental stewardship	Civic Proposal
	4.2 Collective Action	Commons management	Commons Simulation
	4.3 Individual Initiative	Reciprocity and responsible use	Life of a Product

5.A Practical Teaching Model

The approach reduces to five steps, which give teachers a straightforward way to move from a competence framework to an actual learning experience.

1SelectA GreenComp competence.
2LocateA local place, knowledge source or ecological issue.
3InvestigateUsing TEK, science, observation and evidence together.
4ApplyThrough a classroom, field or community task.
5ActAn individual or collective response.

6.What This Approach Changes

The value of bringing GreenComp and TEK into conversation is not that one framework replaces the other. GreenComp provides a common educational structure. TEK can provide specific examples of how people have observed, understood and interacted with particular environments over time. Scientific knowledge adds methods for testing, measuring and explaining those environments, and local history provides evidence of change.

Students then have a chance to compare sources, question assumptions, investigate their surroundings and make decisions based on evidence. The learning process moves through a clear sequence: framework, place, knowledge, evidence, practice, reflection and action. That is a more useful proposition than asking students to memorise sustainability concepts.

7.Principles for Educators

TEK should be approached as knowledge with context, not as a set of classroom techniques. Fikret Berkes makes the point that traditional knowledge is best understood as a process rather than a fixed body of content, which is why the following principles matter.

Identify the knowledge holder. Traditional knowledge comes from particular peoples, communities and places. Name the source wherever possible.
Avoid generalisation. There is no single, universal form of TEK. Practices differ between cultures and ecosystems.
Do not romanticise. Traditional practices should be investigated critically, like any other source of knowledge.
Use multiple forms of evidence. Observation, oral history, scientific data, historical records and contemporary monitoring can all inform the same investigation.
Respect knowledge boundaries. Some cultural knowledge is not intended for public teaching or unrestricted reproduction.
Keep the local context central. A local environmental question usually provides a stronger learning context than a generic global example.

8.Conclusion

GreenComp tells us which competences students need. Place-based knowledge can help them practise those competences. Sustainability education has to prepare students to understand complex systems, evaluate evidence, imagine different futures and take part in decisions that affect their communities, and GreenComp provides a clear framework for developing those capabilities.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge adds another dimension by showing how particular communities have observed and responded to environmental change across generations. The opportunity for educators is to bring these different knowledge systems into one structured learning process. Students can begin with their own surroundings, investigate what has changed, listen to local knowledge, examine scientific evidence, question assumptions and decide what action is possible. For students aged 11 to 16, that creates a practical route from learning about sustainability to developing the competence to act on it.

Discussion

Questions for educators working with GreenComp.

How is local ecological knowledge already present in your curriculum?

Which GreenComp competence is hardest for your students to practise rather than simply understand?

What could students investigate in their own school, neighbourhood or community?

Where could traditional, Indigenous or other place-based knowledge add context to that investigation?

What evidence would students need before deciding what action to take?

The strongest starting point is often close to home: one place, one question, one competence, one action.

Sources and Further Reading

Berkes, F. (1999). Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management. Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis. Later editions published by Routledge.

Bianchi, G., Pisiotis, U. and Cabrera Giraldez, M. (2022). GreenComp: The European Sustainability Competence Framework. Punie, Y. and Bacigalupo, M. (eds). EUR 30955 EN. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. JRC128040.

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.

Marshall, A., Marshall, M. and Bartlett, C. Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk), developed through the Integrative Science programme at Cape Breton University, Unama'ki (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia).

Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pauly, D. (1995). Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 10(10), 430.

Sobel, D. (2004). Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities. Great Barrington, MA: The Orion Society.

The Seven Generations principle is rooted in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy and its Great Law of Peace (Gayanashagowa).

This working paper draws on the European Commission's GreenComp framework, which is a non-prescriptive reference. The classroom activities are illustrative starting points for educators to adapt to their own students, settings and local context. Traditional and Indigenous knowledge is referenced here with attribution to its specific origins, and should always be taught in that spirit.

How the marks are assigned. Relevance grades the evidence in the named source: Strong where the source directly establishes that traditional knowledge is material to the target, Moderate where it bears indirectly or as a secondary theme, Limited where no source applies. Integration grades the instrument, not opinion: Established where a standing mechanism processes traditional knowledge for that domain (a listing or inventory, an access-and-benefit permit, a recognised management or governance category, or a binding consultation duty), Emerging where a policy instrument recognises it but no mechanism embeds it, Overlooked where neither exists. Eight targets are Established, and each names its mechanism in the snapshot.

About this tool. The SDG Traditional Knowledge Lens reads all 169 UN Sustainable Development Goal targets for how strongly Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous and local knowledge bear on each one, and how far that knowledge is drawn on today. Every rating carries a named source. The relevance and integration marks are 169to1's editorial reading of the cited sources, not an official UN or framework mapping, and are offered as a provisional, source-anchored basis for discussion.

GreenComp alignment. The Lens supports the GreenComp sustainability competences of valuing sustainability, supporting fairness and promoting nature (embodying sustainability values); systems thinking and critical thinking (embracing complexity); and political agency and collective action (acting for sustainability). GreenComp: The European Sustainability Competence Framework (Bianchi, Pisiotis and Cabrera Giraldez; JRC, Publications Office of the European Union, 2022) is reused under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.

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