Empowering Youth Environmental Action

In the lead up to the COP21 Negotiations in Paris in December 2015, TakingITGlobal partnered with a range of environmental youth organizations to support collective action and a stronger lobbying effort around the transition to post carbon societies.  Providing accreditation and networking support to five leading youth initiatives, TIG liaised through YOUNGO, the official youth constituency under the UNFCCC and through the Secretariat’s Joint Framework on Children Youth and Climate.

We also facilitated #Decarbonize, a global educational mobilization, which leveraged over 25,000 hours of student collaboration and the passion of over 10,000 youth. Twelve schools from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ghana, the Philippines, India, Sweden, Peru, South Africa and the United States were engaged in a focused conversation which began examining local contexts and then expanded outwards towards increasingly large segments of our world. Collaborating schools were partnered to connect in digital dialogue focused on building global connection and the creation of a globally oriented action plan to advance the transition to a clean energy world. 

The result is the #Decarbonize White paper, a youth statement, which calls for locally driven global change along the themes of energy, water and oceans, resilience and adaptation, agriculture, forests and land use, international aid, education and action.

This Fall, we have focused on growing our Environmental Action programs through the relaunch of our successful and engaging DeforestACTION program, bringing on one of our most active and recently retired educators, Mali Bickley, to help develop the program and engage more schools. We developed new educator resources and hosted several orientation sessions to engage schools from across Canada and the world in the program

DeforestACTION is a collaborative and interactive project that connects students globally to investigate the causes and effects of deforestation on local and global levels. Over the course of 8 weeks, TakingITGlobal creates, moderates and facilitates online learning activities and project planning webinars, where students and teachers take a collaborative approach to global problem solving. Students form local and global action groups and designed plans to address deforestation in their local communities. Students examine the issue in:

• Finding ways to preserve at risk forest and creating livelihoods for local landowners
• Creating a global awareness campaign for the destruction caused by palm oil production, building, logging and
• Collaborating with local people and helping animals who are victims of deforestation

The DeforestACTION project links inquiry based learning principles while supporting specific curriculum goals. (math, science, social and environmental studies, media, literacy). Students meet experts in the field through video conferencing, such as orang-utan zookeepers, environmentalists in Borneo and local governmental agencies in the forestry industry. These real time authentic learning opportunities provided the students to engage with stakeholders in a global issue and engage in conversations in a multi-perspective view.

Students in the program created a variety of media that is shared on class blogs and social media channels! Some are shared in the links in this report. We also partnered with the Orangutan keeper at the Toronto Zoo, who has appeared live to speak with students about the threat posted by Deforestation to Orangutan habitats.

Links:

• Student video on Deforestation
• DeforestACTION web site
• Cutting down trees student video