Have you heard the saying, “the only constant is change?” Whether or not the Greek philosopher Heraclitus actually said this, it’s become a hallmark response to people expressing uncomfortableness with change and uncertainty. When confronted with change, responses can happen along a spectrum; from digging in our heels and flat out denying that change is happening to taking action to usher in the change we want for ourselves and for our communities. At this year’s Summer Institute for Climate Change Education we dove deeply into the idea of change.
As an older millennial, I have found a way to live with the uncertainty of life. I’ll admit, sometimes it’s through apathy or defensiveness, but mostly it’s with acceptance and an eagerness to learn. I’m interested in going beyond merely acknowledging that change is happening, let’s explore the variables that help people find their agency within a changing environment.
So what’s the recipe for meeting change with openness? How can we remain permeable to the uncertainty that we are all faced with?
This year, the overarching theme at the Institute was Changemakers in Action. Originally coined by Ashoka’s founder in 1980 and later put into the public consciousness by Bill Clinton during the 2016 presidential race, the term changemaker has been a name that refers to a person that sees themselves as capable of creating large-scale positive change. Since then the term has taken on many different meanings, all unique to their own contexts.
The key phrase here being “sees themselves as capable”; that’s where agency comes in. Agency, or the sense of control that you feel in your life and the faith you have in your ability to handle a wide range of situations, is crucial for people to find their niche for stewarding the change they want to see. At the Summer Institute, participants engaged in a number of events aimed at increasing their confidence, competence, and agency in teaching climate change and creating opportunities for action within their communities. Read on to learn more about the 5 components of building agency in the climate change movement.
- Accepting the Urgency
We once talked about climate change as something that would harm future generations, but we can no longer ignore that we are all experiencing the impacts right now, while some of us have been for much longer. Climate change affects our day to day lives. Whether its extreme heat or smaller, seemling unnoticeable changes in the relationships between plants and animals. Summer Institute attendees explored the science behind climate change and how Indigenous peoples have been adapting to changes, including climate change, for millennia. When we see examples of other people and living creatures taking action to adapt, we know that we can also take action.
- Feeling the Connection
When asked if they feel personally impacted by climate change, the majority of U.S. Americans say no. This is unfortunate, because we know that climate change affects the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the places that provide us with shelter. Climate change also impacts people’s mental and physical health. At the Summer Institute we explored the connection between these impacts to better understand the deep connection between our lives and the changing environment. Feeling the gravity of climate change’s impacts on our day to day lives can be overwhelming, but it can also create a spark for action. If we can accept that people and other living things that we love are being harmed by climate change, we are more likely to do something about it.
- Building Relationships
It can be challenging to see the direct connection between our lives and climate change, especially when most of us don’t talk about climate on a regular basis and we don’t hear about it in the media. It is even harder when we live in communities that are actively dissuading us from acknowledging the climate crises. Developing relationships with people who know and care about the issue is vital to inspiring climate action. Attendees at the Summer Institute were connected with an international community of like-minded educators seeking to learn more about what they can do to increase their climate literacy and bring it back to their communities. In workshops, the online discussion forum, and in-person events, attendees built connections that will sustain them beyond the Summer Institute.
- Understanding the Levers for Change
The climate crisis is a systemic issue that requires systemic change. Not all solutions to climate change are equally impactful, and not all are available to everyone. At Climate Generation, we believe education is the most important systemic climate solution; it is how we prepare ourselves and our future generations to thrive. At the Summer Institute, we explored this complex topic through a series of workshops from experts across many disciplines, including politics, economics, and education. Educating ourselves and others can better prepare us to actively participate in a green economy, help us understand political decision-making, open our eyes to the disinformation campaigns working against us, and invigorate solutions in our communities. Education is a climate change solution.
- Taking Action
We get it. It’s hard to see the road to a just, sustainable future without a clear path to get there. That’s why we need to work in relationship with one another and build bridges across differences so we can hear stories of success. This year at the Summer Institute, we highlighted five groups who created climate change solutions for their communities. Through thoughtful, exploratory discussion, educators learned of the problem they were hoping to solve and the steps they took to get there. Presenters shared about the nuts and bolts of the projects, including who they worked with, what hurdles they came across, and what types of support made the work successful.
Educators left with a better vision for possibilities in their own local context.
At Climate Generation, we view changemakers as people who understand that they can be agents of change in the world, and work to make a difference through inclusive and collaborative problem solving. From youth advocating to their local policy makers in the capitol to the teachers who helped them coordinate rides to get there, we are all changemakers in our own way. We encourage you to see opportunities to build your own agency for taking climate action this year.
Interested in attending the Summer Institute for Climate Change Education? View the full Summer Institute Agenda and keep an eye on our plans for next year. Educators will be engaging with climate change education throughout the year through our online Teach Climate Network. Are you in the network? Check it out and sign up!
Lindsey Kirkland supports on-going climate change education programs for K-12 educators and public audiences. As the Education Manager, she also develops a vision for and provides strategic coordination for programs focusing primarily on professional development for teachers and informal educators. Lindsey is adjunct faculty at Hamline University and supported the development of their Climate Literacy Certificate, a contributing author of NSTA’s Connect Science Learning journal, and an active member of Climate Literacy and the Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) and the North American Association of Environmental Education (NAAEE) Guidelines for Excellence writing team. Lindsey has served as an environmental educator with the AmeriCorps program the NJ Watershed Ambassadors, worked as a naturalist and education program coordinator for the NJ Audubon Society, and assisted in program development for museums, universities, and new nonprofit organizations in the United States and Australia. Lindsey holds a BS in Environment, Conservation and Fisheries Sciences from the University of Washington in Seattle, WA and a MEd in Science Education from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. In her spare time, Lindsey enjoys spending time with her husband and her son.
The post Reflections: 2024 Summer Institute for Climate Change Education appeared first on Climate Generation.
Reflections: 2024 Summer Institute for Climate Change Education
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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
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Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
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Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products
We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
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