DfE Snapshot – The next issue of the DfE’s Climate in Education Snapshot is now available. It includes:
- An update on the investment DfE is making into Green Skills
- An update on the National Education Nature Park and Climate Action Award Scheme pilot
- An overview on DfE’s experience at SOS-UK’s Student Sustainability Summit
- The sharing of good practice from Brighton and Hove City Council
- And additional information.
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Track Changes – Teach the Future’s Curriculum for a Changing Climate: track changes review of the national curriculum for England, has new reports for the English and Modern Foreign Language (MFL) curricula for KS3 and KS4. These highlight the range of opportunities for climate education to be integrated into these subjects throughout secondary school. You can read more about it in this TTF blog.
Teachers are already using the examples from the track changes review and implementing the suggestions for a range of subjects. If you have used this resource for your teaching and learning, please complete this Google Form or write to sdukes@chase.worcs.sch.uk
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Greener Steel – An article in the Economist: A new way to clean up the steel industry, explores a new idea in making the steel industry much less environmentally damaging. As we note in our own resource, Green Steel, for every tonne of steel produced, around 1.8 tonnes of CO2 are emitted. As a result, steelmaking accounts for 7-9% of the world’s anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions. Green Steel explores cleaner ways of producing steel including those that use hydrogen instead of coke as the reductant. It notes how lengthy and expensive the transition could be. Now, academics from the University of Birmingham, have suggested a process which could be fitted quickly and relatively cheaply to existing plants, and might cut their emissions by around 90%.
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UKSSN Survey – It takes under 5 mins to complete this online UKSSN survey to help it make its communications as effective as possible. Please complete the form by 1800 on Monday 27 February
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Scottish Asks – Teach the Future is hosting a parliamentary reception in Scotland, to launch its updated “asks” for its Scotland campaign. If you can help encourage MSPs to show their support by attending the reception, please write to them.
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£1,000 Green Project – Let’s Go Zero – the national campaign for zero carbon schools – is helping school staff and students create projects that inspire climate action through a connection to nature. You can join in by telling the OVO Foundation how your school would use the prize money to bring students closer to nature. Enter by March 6th.
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Global Education – Highland One World has worked with early level practitioners from across Scotland on a new resource for supporting global citizenship education through a child-led, play-based approach. There are interactive courses for nursery practitioners and primary 1 teachers to develop skills and confidence to embed global citizenship education through play, as well as for primary science and secondary social science subjects.
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Harmony and Nature – The Harmony Project is exploring how to put sustainability and nature at the heart of learning about energy and climate change. It says, join its forthcoming webinar to explore the teaching pack it has created to help educators work with primary school students to examine the link between climate change and our use of energy from carbon-emitting fossil fuels.
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Up Close to Nature – Recent research by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology explored the role of citizen scientists. 500 volunteers from across the UK were randomly assigned to carry out a 10-minute nature-based activity at least five times over eight days: a pollinating insects survey, a butterfly survey, simply spending time in nature and writing down three good things they noticed, or a combination of both. The groups were surveyed both before and after taking part to assess differences in their connection to nature, wellbeing and pro-nature behaviour. The researchers found that all volunteers showed increased scores in wellbeing and feeling connected to nature after completing their activities. This will likely not be news to regular readers.
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No More Fairy Tales – This is a collection of 24 short stories by Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Sara Foster, Andrew Dana Hudson, Brian Burt, and others, exploring technological and systemic solutions to the climate crisis, and imagining what the future might look like. You can read about it here.
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Ocean Acidification – As carbon emissions change the chemistry of the seas, ocean acidification threatens not only marine life, but also human livelihoods. A series of films explore these issues.
- The other carbon problem 1
- How does the ocean’s deepest point reveal its past? 2
- Why are baby oysters dying? 3
- Is the ocean acidic? 4
- What is causing ocean acidification? 5
- Why are corals dissolving? / Will deep sea ecosystems survive? 6
- A threat to human livelihoods 7
- What are the ‘potato chips of the sea’? 8
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Good News – Uganda’s recently released poverty report shows that between 2017 and 2020, at least 1.52 million Ugandans secured better livelihoods compared to the previous period. The report also shows that poverty is on a long-running decrease, having fallen from 56% in 1993 to 20% in 2021. There’s more c/o UNDP.
The World Bank is launching a project in Vietnam to distribute 300,000 water purifiers to 8,000 schools and institutions across the country. It’s expected to make clean water available to around two million children and to reduce carbon emissions by almost 3 million tonnes over the next five years (no more burning wood to boil water).
There’s more stories like these from Future Crunch.
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Forests and Farming – Siyi Kan (UCL) and Bin Chen (Fudan University) argue in The Conversation that more than 60% of global forest loss is not related to farming. They say that, while farming continues to drive deforestation around the world, 60% of the destruction of Earth’s large, intact forests is caused by other forces. In particular, more than one-third of this destruction can be blamed on the production of commodities for export, particularly timber, minerals and oil and gas.
Meanwhile, Emma Garnett (University of Oxford), says that the meat industry is competing with native forest for the same land in the UK and Ireland.
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Northern Drift – The Guardian reports that climate change has prompted the Royal Horticultural Society to plan to move its important collection of rhododendrons from its Wisley garden in Surrey to Harlow Carr in North Yorkshire. It follows similar decisions to move Wisley’s national collections of rhubarb and gooseberries to their Bridgewater garden in Salford.