Education and Green Jobs – The Environmental Audit Committee is holding an inquiry into Green Jobs focusing on how green jobs can help tackle the expected rise in unemployment due to COVID-19 in a sustainable way. It will also look at the jobs, skills and training needed to achieve the UK’s longer-term climate and environmental ambitions and what planning and work is taking place to meet these requirements. NAEE has presented a written submission to the inquiry and will give oral evidence on March 3rd (1430). We’ll have more details about this next week. The first committee session was held on February 3rd and you can see the witnesses and what they said here. NAEE has argued that all jobs need to be seen as green jobs because of [i] the environmental laws and regulation already in place that all employers and employees now face in a routine, everyday way; and [ii] because of the moral imperatives which underpin these.
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Education for our Common Wealth – CASTME links science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) educators across the Commonwealth. It has a UK-based board of trustees, with regional groups in Africa, Asia, and Europe. CASTME encourages networking and links between Commonwealth countries through a network of regional meetings, papers at conferences and its website. Its aims are to share best practices in STEM education for all age groups, to demonstrate the relevance of STEM to local environments and to promote the relationship between them. You’ll find details of its projects here.
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Are you Environmentally Literate – Although the K–12 Environmental Education: Guidelines for Excellence relate to the United States, they provide a comparative insight into expectations for fourth (age 10), eighth (age 14) and twelfth grade (age 18) students. They also outline a framework for environmental education programmes and curricula and help define the aims of environmental education. Our US cousin, NAAEE, says that they “set a standard for high quality education, based on what an environmentally literate person should know and be able to do by the time they graduate from high school. They draw on the best thinking in the field to outline the core ingredients of environmental education“. You will find them here.
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Humour Environmental Education – The journal, Environmental Education Research has issued a call for contributions for a special edition on humour and environmental education. The editors note: “While environmental education scholars are increasingly attending to the emotional and affective dimensions of our work, including discussing grief, loss, solastalgia, anxiety, despair, hope, love, care, and empathy (see Russell & Oakley, 2016), humour has received minimal attention in the field. … We want to encourage research and scholarly conversations about the role of humour in environmental education, grounded in diverse learning environments, which is especially important given what is found funny is historically, culturally, and contextually specific.” Proposals need to be submitted by March 15th, and the final manuscripts will be due on August 30th.
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BERA Curriculum Conference – The British Curriculum Forum in running a Building a Curriculum for a Sustainable Future interactive virtual conference bringing together educators from schools, colleges and universities from across the UK. Speakers include: Richard Greenwood, Stranmillis University College; Jacquie Ayre, Liverpool World Centre; and Amy Mulvenna, Charles Dickens Primary School. This is free for BERA members and takes place on 18th March 2021: 1630 to 1830. You can register here.
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Increasing Engagement – Defra has published an invitation to tender for a project which aims to improve understanding of [i] children’s engagement with National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and [ii] the barriers and enablers to increasing engagement in future. You will find it here and the deadline is March 10th.
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Making Peace with Nature – The first UNEP synthesis report: “Making Peace With Nature: A scientific blueprint to tackle the climate, biodiversity and pollution emergencies, is based on evidence from global environmental assessments. The report shows how climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution can be tackled jointly within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. You can download the report here.
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How Green is the Drax Biomass? – Today, some 8% of the UK’s electricity is coming from the burning of biomass. The largest installation is the 2.6GW plant at Drax near Selby where 4 out of its 6 generators have been converted from coal burning. UK electricity consumers contribute £790 million a year to fund this. Most of the pellets are shipped from Canada and the USA, and Drax has just bought Pinnacle Renewable Energy, a Canadian pellet producer, to ensure continuing supplies. The trouble is that some of the pellets that Pinnacle produces are dried by heat produced by burning natural gas. Many critics question the environmental benefits of biomass anyway, given the time it takes for forests to grow and the warming effect as this happens. Doug Parr, chief scientist for Greenpeace UK, said: “Using gas to dry wood for burning in a power station, specifically with the aim of reducing fossil fuel use, provides a great example of the publicly funded madness.” You can read what the Drax operators say here. Whatever the ins and outs of this, it’s another great example of a controversial issue for students to investigate and discuss.
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Greening the power grid was the easy bit – Of all richer countries, the UK is making the best progress in reducing its carbon emissions, says The Economist in a recent feature. They are down by 44% since 1990 as the economy grew by two-thirds”. However, it says: “greening the power grid was the easy bit. Heating and transport will be harder“. Any teacher helping their students to understand what further decarbonising of the economy will involve will find this article useful. Politics and economics feature heavily in such considerations, of course, which is why environmental education needs a cross-disciplinary approach.
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Green Energy from the tides – A Scottish-built tidal energy turbine and generator is being used in the straits of Naru Island, part of Japan’s Goto island chain to generate electricity in a pilot project. It is widely thought that the predictability of tides can create a reliable source of green energy, although only a small number exist around the world and there are none in UK waters despite having been discussed for ~30 years. The Goto island turbine created 10MWh of electricity in the first ten days of its operation. See this for more detail on the pros and cons of tidal energy generation.
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Engineered Wood – The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science heard about wood possibly taking over from steel and concrete in the building of tall structures. The tallest such building at the moment is 85m high in Norway, but this is set to be overshadowed by the 228m tall River Beech Tower, that’s proposed for a site beside the Chicago river. But this isn’t ordinary wood and is a long way from the log cabins built by settlers. This is composite ‘engineered wood’ that makes a big difference to CO2 emissions. In the UK, for example, building a 300-square-metre four-storey composite wooden building in Cambridge generated 126 tonnes of CO2. Made from concrete, this would have been 310 tonnes, and from steel 498 tonnes. All this and the carbon is locked away for a long time. There’s more detail in The Economist.
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$50,000 – UNESCO is calling for nominations for the 2021 UNESCO-Japan Prize on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Funded by the Government of Japan since 2015, three “outstanding projects by institutions and organizations” will each get $50,000 and be invited to establish a long-term collaboration with UNESCO by joining the ESD for 2030 Global Network (ESD-Net). You can nominate projects here and see past prize winners here.