Teach the Future – Anna Brown argues that it’s been a great year for the Teach the Future campaign, especially for our new nations and international groups. For example: “Teach the Future has become a major stakeholder in the Fridays for Future Europe climate education forum. It sends 8 representatives to work on campaigns and demand development at a continental level. This expansion of knowledge on a European plane allowed our campaign to work with Members of the European Parliament for the first time this year, hosting meetings with political engagement volunteers from the UK and members of the Klimaat in de Klas group from the Netherlands. You can read Anna’s full analysis here.
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Green Teacher – Every edition of the Canadian educational magazine, Green Teacher includes articles that are freely available, whether you subscribe or not. The late 2020 edition included these: Transformational Zooming by Vanessa LeBourdais: How to turn a video conference class into an embodied and engaging learning experience, and The Grow Project by Sarah Keyes and Anne Munier: A case study of a curriculum-aligned school garden program. Details of other free articles can be found here.
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AimHi – This is an “online school where everyone can learn, interact and be inspired by exceptional educators and charismatic role models.” It runs a series of webinars on climate and environmental issues. Forthcoming sessions can be found here. These include: What’s the future of our food and farms? (Jan 27th) and Understand the climate crisis in 45 minutes (Jan 20th). Both are conducted in collaboration with Education Scotland. The sessions are free and open for everyone to watch on a livestream page.
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A Decade of Ocean Science – In December 2017, the United Nations proclaimed a Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, to begin in 2021. This Decade will aim to provide a common framework to ensure that ocean science can fully support countries’ actions to sustainably manage the Oceans and more particularly to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Ocean Science combines a variety of disciplines (physical, geological and chemical oceanography as well as marine biology) that study and provide data on the global marine environment (marine organisms, ecosystem dynamics, ocean currents, waves, geophysical fluids dynamics, plate tectonics and the geology of the sea floor as well as fluxes of various chemical substances and physical properties within the Ocean and across its boundaries).
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Soil Care – Click here to read the latest newsletter from the Soil Care Network. Its content includes the launch of UKsoils.org which aims to create better access to information on economic, societal and ecological aspects of soil; and a new interactive platform called Soil Revealed was developed to map the carbon sequestration potential worldwide.
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World Wildlife Day – To celebrate this, IFAW is hosting its third annual global youth art contest in collaboration with CITES and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This year’s theme is Forests and Livelihoods: Sustaining People and Planet. Its goal is to shed light on the importance of forest ecosystems for animals, like woodlands and rainforests, and to honour Indigenous people around the world who have acted as guardians of the land for centuries. All artists aged 4-18 are invited to take part. Entries will be accepted from now until the 7th February.
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The Earth’s Digital Twin – The European Union has announced plans to build a digital twin of the Earth. Destination Earth, or DestinE, will draw real-time data from climate, atmospheric, meteorological and behavioural sensors to construct a high-precision model of the planet. By rendering the Earth’s atmosphere to a one-kilometre scale, DestinE’s supercomputing capacity will go far beyond today’s modelling infrastructure to give policymakers the computing power necessary to gauge how climate change will impact society and at the same time to visualise how the decisions we make as a society could alter the trajectory of climate change.
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Universities and Climate Change – A report from the Higher Education Policy Institute think tank [ HEPI ] urges universities to have zero carbon emissions by 2035 and to rethink knowledge and teaching practices for the era of climate change. Amongst a range of recommendations is this: “the development of a massive open programme of public learning as a partnership between the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), the BBC and UK higher education.”
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39 Ways to Save the Planet – This is a series from BBC Radio Four, in partnership with the Royal Geographical Society. It presents 39 ideas to relieve the stress that climate change is exerting on the planet. 12 episodes are available so far. Each is ~15 minutes long and they are available on BBC Sounds.
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Protected Areas and Climate Change – The British Ecological Society has a three-day on-line meeting this week 19 to 21 January to explore the role of protected areas under climate change. Some now question the usefulness of PAs in a world where species distributions are changing in response to climate change, but new species of conservation concern may move into reserves, meaning PAs will remain valuable but for different reasons.
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Field Guide to the Pacific Northwest – Experts, poets and artists are working together to create a literary field guide for the Cascadia region of B.C., Washington State and Oregon, organized by “kinship clusters” rather than western taxonomy. Writer and naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield, who says her “origins and heart home are in the Pacific Northwest,” is working part-time with Terrain.org poetry editor Derek Sheffield and former Alaska State Writer Laureate Ernestine Hayes on the labour of love. There’s more detail here.
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Conservation and citizen Science – ZSL is holding a webinar on February 9th – 1800 to 1930 – that will use case studies from a number of projects to illustrate what motivates people to get involved in citizen science, what the potential impacts of citizen science projects are, and which sections of society aren’t engaging and why.