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