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Third meeting of the Czech team

On 3 May we had our third meeting about the project. We split into two groups which will be dealing with one topic each. The first group will deal with the issue of waste management and the second group will deal with energy management in our town (this topic has replaced the original topic of transport). We watched a presentation which we made within our technical subjects. It was about waste recycling generally and about old paper processing. This will be inspiration for our further work. On the web pages of project we read articles from meetings of the other members of the "green gang". We will now focus on waste management in Spálené Poříčí (sorting of beverage cartons, transport of waste, waste collection points, places for storage of biowaste etc.) and we will explore how the citizens in our town produce heat and what we can do to improve it.

Vote the logo!

Dear participants,
the italian group proposes two possible logos for the COP-Y: vote your favorite one!!!
Look at the logos and post a comment on the blog, wiriting Logo A or Logo B - version 1 or Logo B - Version 2.

You have time until the 29th of May!

Logo A

Logo B - version 1

Logo B - version 2

Second meeting of the Czech team

Hello. We would like to introduce ourselves briefly. We are students of the secondary school in Spálené Poříčí which is a little town in the west of the Czech Republic. We are studying the field PROTECTION OF NATURE AND ENVIRONMENT. We joined this project in order to work on ecological issues of our region. Our main philosophy is the idea that we all have to begin with small steps, small things we can do to protect our environment, because a lot of small steps together make one huge step. That is why we will deal with the situation of environmental protection in our town. We will focus on the issue of composting and recycling of boxes and we will also deal with the situation of transport. Our second meeting took place on 19 April. We planned the next meeting for 2 May. In the next meeting we are going to present information we learned from our local authorities concerning the situation of transport and composting in our town.

First meeting of the Czech team

On 8 March 2011 our Czech team at the secondary school in Spalene Porici had its first meeting about its participation in the project Think Green Think Young. We discussed the time schedule of the project, created a blog to be able to add contributions and distributed tasks for the next session.

TRAINING COURSE- BULGARIAN SECOND MEETING

On April 14, 2011 (Thursday) was organized the second meeting of the project. Each group (WASTE, MOBILITY AND ENERGY) made a presentation of the research they had conducted. Most of the analyses were very profound presenting detailed information about the ecological problems in Burgas, factors that cause them and ways of solving them or reducing the negative impact on the environment. Evidences for and against were presented for each of the statements.
A special guest of the meeting was a lecturer in ecology in “Proff. Assen Zlatarov” University, Burgas, who made comments after each presentation of youth groups as well as provoking them with questions. He gave very good directions to the young people about the content of their analyses (what has to be added, on which topics have to be paid more attention etc.), how to collect the necessary information, always to check the reliability of the sources of information they intend to use and also answered to the questions of the participants.

CLEANING THE BEACH OF BURGAS

On April 9, 2011 (Saturday) at 11: 00 am Burgas Municipality and Bulgarian Association for the Promotion of Citizen Initiative organized a cleaning of the beach in Burgas, as part of the spring cleaning in Burgas Municipality. The initiative was joined by the young participants of “Think Green, Think Young” project.
Encourage by the enthusiasm of the young people, citizens of Burgas and their children also joined the initiative to clean our home city.

22 March

Today is World Water Day!!!

To learn more: World Water Day - 22 March

Article: part 2

Here the rest of the article!

Virgina Panara

Climate refugees

Hi everybody! I've found a very interesting article about the climatic changes and their consequences on the populations on the March number of "Le Scienze". Unfortunately, the article is only in Italian... I'm sorry!

Virginia Panara

Here you can find an interesting article about the first conflicts climate changes conflicts in Kenya, in 2009: 

The first climate change conflicts - Drought is testing pastoralists and peace in North Kenya

 

(The Guardian, Monday 23 November 2009)

You can find much more material on these issues on the CCAPS website.

The CCAPS ( Climate Change and African Political Styability) is a research center that deals with the relationship between the growing threat of climate change and the ability of African countries to manage complex emergencies, including humanitarian disasters and violent conflict.

Training Course - Italian Second Meeting

The Italian participants met on Friday, 4^th March 2011, to attend the Second Meeting of the Local Training Course.

As in the First Meeting, we spent some time in watching the second part of BBC Documentary “Planet Earth” and some slides about the effects of climate changes on Earth.

After a short debate on the use of renewable sources and on some interventions for the mitigation adopted by local governments, every group introduced to all the participants the progress of their part of the State of the Environment.

Every group (Mobility, Waste and Energy) collected some interviews about people’s perception of climate changes in their every day lives and some information on Internet about how the local governments approach to climate changes and which kind of interventions are implemented to face the problem.

We all agreed that our State of the Environment should address two objectives:

1. it will be used to introduce to the public body the point of view of the young people about the environment and to make some proposals for public interventions to face the climate changes locally;

2. it will represent a theoretical basis for us for developing our future Local Action Plans

Talking about these two main objectives, we decided to use two communication tools: the first one is a written document, which will be used to introduce our work and proposals to the politicians; the second one is a video documentary, which will collect the common feeling of people about climate changes and will be implemented with some scenes from the COP-Y week. We’ll use the video documentary to inform people about the project and to involve other young people in the realization of our Local Action Plans.

We concluded our meeting talking about the organization of the COP-Y: everyone is invited to share his opinions and ideas about all the activities we could realize in a week (round tables, meetings with experts and politicians, free time and leisure,…).

We’d like that all the participants, also from Czech Republic and Bulgaria, share their proposals on the blog! You can find a special section called “The COP-Y” at the top of the blog: please play your part!

Rivers of Ice - Vanishing glaciers of the Greater Himalaya

Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya showcases the work of photographer and mountaineer David Breashears, who with Glacier Research Imaging Project (GRIP), has retraced the steps of renowned mountain photographers of the past century to recapture images of these mountains and their glaciers from exactly the same vantage points. Rivers of Ice displays his recent photographs alongside the corresponding historic images, revealing the alarming loss in ice mass that has taken place over the intervening years.

In the site you can timetravel to 1921 to have an idea of the loss of glaciers' mass and watch some videos about this subject.

Waste in exchange for food: the ecology in Brazil fights hunger

Green Exchange Program "An appetite for recycling"

With four kilograms of separated waste you bring home a pound of vegetables and fresh local vegetables. It happens in Brazil, in the city of Curitiba.
The city had two major problems: a surplus of food production, which kept prices too low by dropping the income of farmers, and widespread poverty among the non-agricultural population.
It's born for this, the Green Exchange program: the council buys surplus food from manufacturers and distributes them to disadvantaged groups in exchange for their waste.
In this way the collection has been dramatically increasing, the waste has decreased dramatically, the population had a poorer nutritional support and, finally, the prices of agricultural products have become more stable and higher for farmers.

Training Course - Italian First Meeting

On Friday, 4^th February 2011, the 20 Italian “Green Ambassadors” met to attend the First Meeting of the Training Course.

We began the meeting with a Name Game: everyone had to introduce himself to the rest of the group with his name, preceded by an adjective related to the person. It was a funny way to know each others.

After that, we played with the “Flower Garden for Expectations”, an non-formal way to evaluate the local training course. To have an idea of the activity, look at the picture: on flowers  we wrote our expectations and on stones our fears about the training course!

 (The Flower Garden for Expectations)

After playing, the “serious” part of the meeting started: the environmental education.

We watched the BBC Documentary “Planet Earth”, about climate changes, to introduce the first meeting issue, climate changes definition and causes.

After that, we analyzed some slides about climate changes to better understand how does it work and we discussed about the way we came in contact with this issue: the most of us faced the subject at school or University, someone was sensitized directly by his parents.

Finally, after a short brake, we divided ourselves into three working groups, based on the thematic we choose amongst all during the First International Meeting in September:  MOBILITY, ENERGY and WASTE. The groups will work at home to find out the connections between climate changes and the three thematic: every group will produce a little report in English and these three documents collected will constitute the first step for the creation of our Local State of Environment.

For the next time, a representative person for every group will introduce the subject to the rest of the participants. Then, we will face climate changes consequences and we will discuss about how to develop our Local State of Environment.

A project about global warming and climate changes

Here it is a link to a blog about a project, Scuola21, concerning global warming and climate change:

www.ilclimacambianoicambiamo.wordpress.com

have a look at it (there are also a French section, a Spanish section and an English section by the students of "Leonardo Da Vinci" Institute in Vigevano, studying foreign languages) and promote it amongst your friends!!! Bye for now,

Andrea

TRAINING COURSE- BULGARIAN FIRST MEETING

On January 21, 2011 the first meeting of the bulgarian participants in project "Think Green, Think Young!" tokk place.

The meeting began with a short introduction made by each pf the participants abouth themselves, and a few words abouth their interests, hobbies etc.

After that the project was introdused in details to the participants, its objectives and the problems it addresses and tries to solve. The young people were informed about the Seveso disaster, which happened in 1976 and the effect it had on the local population and the country. We all shared the opinion that it’s truly important to be aware of the effect, our actions play on nature and people around us.

The meeting continued with the formation of working groups based on the themes: WASTE, MOBILITY AND ENERGY. The groups were given a task to do a research about the ecological status in Burgas, depending on the group they are in and to make a short presentation at the next meeting, showing the results of their research.