IUBS Project: Climate Change Education

The TROP ICSU project highlights its accomplishments at the end of year 2020. The project has colleced, collated and developed over 280 Teaching Resources, which soan across 10 Disciplines. There are over 50 Contributing Teachers from many countries who have contributed teaching resources to the collection. Till year 2020, the TROP ICSU team has conducted 17 Workshops in 10 Countries with over  700 Workshop Participants and over 50 Climate Experts.

The project has published 3 Publications and has been preented in many international conferences and events including events by United Nations. The projects holds 2 websites with over 135,900 visitors and a YouTube channel. The project is having 23 partners which includes national science academies, internatonal scientific unions, educatioanl institutes and United Nations organizations. 

The project team continues to develop and collate educatioanl resources for climate change education by integrating them with the regular curricula of various desciplines. 

The project TROP ICSU has crossed the mark of developing a hundred Lesson Plans in October 2020. This milestone was possible due to the wonderful collaboration and knowledge contribution by the network of partners, collaborators, teachers, educators, and climate science experts.

These Lesson Plans span across various curricula topics and are distributed across ten disciplines. They can be directly used by teachers in both physical and digital classroom setup or can be used with proper customization as per the local context.
 

Engagement of the youth in climate action is a key factor in mitigating the global issue with local solutions. With this imperative, TROP ICSU has joined hands with the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), India to create a platform to host engagements between climate change experts (scientists, activists, social entrepreneurs among many) with young students. A webinar series is launched under this initiative of Climate Change Challenge 2.0 from August 2020.

(Image: Climate Change Challenge, CCMB, India)

To widen the reach and increase the adoption of the TROP ICSU educational resources, some of the resources have been translated into various languages with assistance from th project partners. TROP ICSU welcomes contributions from teachers, educators, climate science experts, and all collaborators in enhancing the suite of educational resources.

The translated educational resources are available on the ‘TROP ICSU in Different Languages‘ section of the project website.

Some of the TROP ICSU Lesson Plans are now equipped with Video Tutorials about how to use the Lesson Plans in regular teaching. The video tutorials are useful to not only teachers but also to self-learners. These videos are available on the project website and on the YouTube channel.

A TROP ICSU Lesson Plan Development Workshop was conducted at the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society's next national conference in Fremantle, Western Australia on 14 February 2020. This workshop was convened by our collaborators at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, UNSW Sydney, University of Melbourne, and the Monash Climate Change Communication Hub. The main focus of the event was the development of lesson plans for the Australian curriculum.

A detailed report about the workshop is available here.

The TROP ICSU project has been funded by the International Science  Council (ISC) during the first phase (2017-2019). The accomplishments of TROP ICSU, feedback from various stake-holders and future plans have been featured by ISC in an online article published in February 2020. Representative feedback received from various stake-holders such as participants of educators workshops, undergraduate students, members of partner unions and the motive behind the TROP ICSU project are included in this article. The article can be found here.

The exciting first phase (2017-2019) of the TROP ICSU project ended with the year 2019.  The accomplishments of TROP ICSU project during this phase and future plans are presented in this consolidated report.

The TROP ICSU project was represented at three sessions on climate education at the UN Climate Change Conference COP 25, held in Madrid from 2 December to 13 December 2019 under the Presidency of the Government of Chile and with logistical support from the Government of Spain.

TROP ICSU was invited to participate in 3 sessions on climate education at COP 25: at the IPCC-WMO pavilion, at the EU pavilion, and at the French pavilion.

The third TROP ICSU Working Group Meeting was held at the French Academy of Sciences (Académie des sciences, Institut de France), Paris, France on October 14 and 15, 2019. The meeting was attended by 21 participants, including Working Group members, collaborators, partners, and the Implementation Team members. Over two days, the project and its implementation were presented and reviewed, suggestions for further enhancement were discussed, and possible ideas for the continuation of the project in its next phase beyond December 2019 were discussed.

(Photo: IUBS)

IUBS Climate Change Education Project TROP ICSU  participated at the United Nations High Level Political Forum 2019 (HLPF 2019) on Sustainable Development at the United Nations Headquarters on 11 July 2019 in a three-hour joint session with the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) and Harvard University. This session is titled "Practices and Approaches on quality education towards environment and climate action."

The TROP ICSU team facilitated a teachers workshop in Orsay, France on 28 June 2019 in collaboration with Paris-Sud University (Université Paris-Sud). The workshop was attended by 25 teachers.

The TROP ICSU team will conduct three teachers workshop in  Australia in May 2019. The first workshop will be conducted on 24th May with Monash University, the second one on 27 May with University of Melbourne and the third workshop will be conducted on 30th and 31st May with University of Adelaide.

(Image credit: Encyclopedia Britannica)

TROP ICSU was represented in two side events at the Forth Science, Technology and Innovation Forum for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on 14th and 15th may 2019, held at United Nations Headquarters New York.

The TROP ICSU team conducted a teachers workshop in Cairo, Egypt in April 2019. This workshop was conducted in collaboration with our partner Academy of Scientific Research and Technology (ASRT), Egypt.