Transform Our World – GAP is recruiting for 24 young people, aged 14-16 to join its Transform Our World team. Full details on what’s involved and how to apply are here. Here’s a Tweet and a LinkedIn post if you’d care to spread the word.
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Environmental History – UCL Press has announced the publication of a new open access book: History and the Climate Crisis: Environmental history in the classroom. The author is Dr Kate Hawkey who works at the University of Bristol. The book makes the case for including an environmental focus in the secondary school history curriculum by locating its arguments within established historiographical and revisionist debates. It provides much-needed subject knowledge in an area that is new for most history teachers. The author considers the disciplinary and pedagogical challenges and demonstrates how including an environmental focus can strengthen students’ disciplinary knowledge. Kate builds her argument through the use of many examples and offers practical strategies for use in classrooms, including developed enquiries suitable for the secondary history curriculum. The book focuses on environmental history within a strong subject bound curriculum and will be relevant to teachers, academics and policymakers in the UK and internationally. You can download it freely here.
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Nature Connection – WWT’s Generation Wild programme is entering its third year, and over 28,000 children have already taken part completing over 70,000 nature connection activities at home and at school. Generation Wild is a nature connection programme for schools in economically disadvantaged areas. Children follow the magical story of Ava the bird girl, a character who is brought to life during a visit to the wetland centre. She encourages them to complete nature activities back at school and at home to receive their certificates and membership badges as they become ‘Guardians of the Wild’. The project includes free school visits (including free transport) as well as free return visits enabling children to share the experience with their families. Curriculum resource packs have also been produced so you can tie the project in with your class topics. WWT is now taking bookings for participation right through to the end of July 2024. The qualifying criteria are based on the percentage of pupils receiving free school meals and vary by region. To find out more and see if your school qualifies click here.
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Curriculum for a Changing Climate – Teach the Future is crowd funding to help to implement climate education in primary schools through its ‘curriculum for a changing climate’ project. TTF says:
“Much of the national curriculum has not been substantively nor systematically reviewed for over eight years, and the Department for Education hasn’t yet committed to amending it to integrate topics of climate emergency and ecological crisis. We cannot wait, so we have created our curriculum for a changing climate to show where and how climate education can be implemented within the existing guidelines of the English national curriculum. We commissioned a group of academics used a ‘tracked changes’ methodology to show the amendments for a range of KS3 and KS4 (GCSE) subjects. Teachers are already using this guidance to change how they engage with the climate crisis in the classroom so that young people feel empowered by the solutions, rather than feeling hopeless and scared. We now want to provide guidelines for all primary subjects so that more students, across all levels of education, receive better climate education and teachers are supported to teach it.”
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Resources – Project Drawdown’s website sets out a range of resources exploring climate and sustainability topics and solutions through news, perspective, interviews, insights, and features. You can filter your search by ‘Resources for Students’ or several other available categories.
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Young Rights – A United Nations group has proposed that young people should have the right to take national governments to court for failing to tackle climate change. The new report of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child praises the efforts of children for raising environmental issues and suggests that it’s children (rather than adults) who have the kind of wisdom necessary to tackle the problems we face. There’s critical commentary here.
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Winter Volunteers – The Forest of Avon Trust will have plenty of volunteering opportunities available in the coming months, with tree planting dates planned across December, January and February. Please get in touch via info@forestofavontrust.orgfor opportunities to get involved in various locations across the West of England.
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Conservation Concern – Almost 4 in 10 of Europe’s bird species are now of conservation concern – including 14% of global concern – according to researchers. The finding, is in the journal Bird Conservation International, published, by Cambridge University Press, on behalf of BirdLife International. You can read more here.
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August 2nd – This was 2023’s Earth Overshoot Day, the day when humanity has consumed all the resources that the planet can produce over the entire year. There’s a graph on the website which shows how this day has arrived earlier and earlier since the 1970s. In recent times, though, it has levelled off which might (or not) be a positive sign. There’s a comment here on the day from Population Matters.
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More or Less – Ever wondered how many butterflies there are across the entire globe? That’s the question posed by BBC Radio 4’s More or Less and which Butterfly Conservation’s International Officer, Holly Mynott, helped to answer. You can listen here.
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Killing Hares for Biodiversity – Nature Scot, Scotland’s nature agency has been urged to reduce the number of wild animals and birds it allows to be killed after permits to cull almost 47,000 creatures were issued over the past four years. Licences were granted to landowners for 84 species, including geese, hares, buzzards, gulls, gannets, ravens, goosanders, robins, herons and magpies, oystercatchers, lapwings, starlings, curlews and rooks. Surprise has been expressed at many of these examples and OneKind, a Scottish animal welfare charity, told The Times that the numbers were “appalling”. Landowners, meanwhile, say it’s all necessary to “protect biodiversity”. For example, more than 11,000 brown hares and mountain hares were killed because of the damage they cause to crops and trees or because they spread disease to game birds.
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El Niño – This is an El Niño year. The Economist has a feature explaining what this does and doesn’t likely mean for us all.
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Dealing with Immigration – A report for the United Nations has said that invasive species costs the global economy £336bn a year mainly through their impact on fauna and flora that benefit people. Professor Helen Roy, a member of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, and one of the 200 authors of the report for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), said: “Invasive species are one of the five major drivers of biodiversity loss. They can have really profound influences on our ecosystems and habitats. So far our current policies have been insufficient in managing populations and preventing or controlling invasive species.”
Meanwhile, Guillaume Latombe, from the University of Edinburgh writes in The Conversation saying that modern ecosystems are very different to how they were just a few centuries ago and that although invasive species risk a biodiversity disaster there is still time to stop it.