i

Calendar for Climate Change - Quid-Pro-Quo – Intergenerational Education to Ease Global Warming

 

Partners: Germany, Ireland, Cyprus, Malta, Croatia, Italy, Romania

 

Reference number: 2021-1-DE02-KA220-ADU-000035090

 

Period: 01.11.2021 – 31.10.2023

Our climate is breaking down. Rising seas and extreme weather events are costing lives and putting tens of millions of people around the world at risk. And younger generations are being robbed of their future on a healthy, liveable planet. In drier, hotter conditions, wildfires rage out of control, reducing mighty forests to ash. The oceans are warming, and the water is becoming more acidic, causing mass coral die-offs and the loss of breeding grounds for sea creatures. Delicate ecosystems that are home to insects, plants and animals struggle to adapt quickly enough to the changing climate, putting one million species at risk of extinction. That means our food security, health and quality of life are all under threat.

The state of the climate and the health of our planet’s living systems are intimately linked, and changes in one will radically affect the other. But climate change also presents an opportunity to change the way we live so we improve things for us and the planet. The good news is that everyone can make simple, small changes that add up to make a big difference. At home and in your community, the actions you take can have an impact. Pretty soon, small changes form new habits that not only benefit your environment, but also your health and your wallet. “We each have a carbon footprint, which refers to the amount of carbon pollution we create each day as individuals by the choices we make,” says James Schroeder, a leading conservation specialist at Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. “If each of us made small changes — even one — together, we could create a meaningful impact.” Climate solutions already exist and continue to expand. Some of these solutions have existed longer than the problem itself, while others are in the very early stages of development. The Calendar for Climate Change project aims bring together the tacit knowledge of older generations with the technical knowledge of today's digital natives in a bespoke, and mutually beneficial inter-generational learning programme. Calendar for Climate Change will look at best practices from the low-tech eras of older generations and reintroduce them to the everyday life of young adults while at the same time empowering younger digital native adults to help inform older generations how high-tech solutions that are now widely available can be implemented to help streamline the carbon footprint of each individual by improving each household’s efficiency using current available hightech capacities. From growing your own food to programming for efficient energy use. Protecting the future requires older and younger generations to work together. This is the philosophy on which the Calendar for Climate Change project is based. While inter-generational learning is not new in any of the partner countries, the innovation in this project is contained in the act of combining low-tech and high-tech solutions in the one learning programme and it results in a single educational intervention that has potential learning outcomes for all age groups. In Calendar for Climate Change the learning content contained in the low-tech solutions provided by senior citizens is just as valuable as the learning content contained in the high-tech solutions provided by the young digital natives. As such the key objectives of the Calendar for Climate Change project include:
(1) Support the digital transition of older learners by pairing them with young digital natives who will support the development of their digital skills;
(2) Foster intergenerational learning to encourage young and senior learners to develop understand the high-tech and low-tech solutions to climate change;
(3) Develop a support system through intergenerational learning so that young digital natives feel supported by older generations to tackle climate change; helping to alleviate the climate anxiety faced by many young adults today.