Project Summary

Climate change is a global problem caused by several factors. Among them, deforestation and forest degradation generate 20% of total greenhouse gases emissions, responsible for climate change. For this reason, the Forestry sector plays an important role in the fight against this phenomenon. This is especially significant in the case of the European Union, whose consumption of wood and wood products is one of the highest in the world.

Currently, activities focusing on Environmental Education address climate change and forest benefits in a separate way. As a result, society is hindered in understanding the important role of forest in climate change.

This project idea was born to meet this need. The «Educating on “Climate Forests”» project counts with the participation of 5 different partners consisting of NGOs and higher education institutions that work with young people from environmental fields or with concerns on current environmental problems. These partner organizations are E-zavod (Slovenia), EURO (Italy), Usak University (Turkey), Hnutí DUHA - Friends of the Earth (Czech Republic) and, as a coordinating organization, IROKO DFS (Spain).

The overall objective of this project is to broaden the approach of non-formal education to address climate change from the relevance that forests have in its mitigation. 

To do this, a group of youth workers from the non-formal education field is elaborating environmental education activities merging forests and climate change topics.

Once training activities have been developed, they will be tested in local workshops with groups of 10 youngsters (18-30 years old).

After these local workshops, results will be shared and the best activities and practices will be selected to include them in a toolkit containing a handbook (Intellectual Outputs). Together with these resources, an annexed document evaluating local workshops will be produced. It will contain some recommendations and tips on how to apply the activities developed and tested by the project.

The direct beneficiaries of this project are the youth workers involved in the project and the participant youngsters in the local workshops.

The main expected benefits include:

• Firstly, for youth workers: to enhance their skills in planning and developing of environmental non-formal education workshops; to create new links and contacts that may generate in future collaborations.
• Secondly, for participant youngsters: to have the opportunity to participate in an active way in the process of evaluation and improvement of the training activities created by the project; to develop a stronger awareness on the relevance that forests have in fighting climate change; to increase their possibilities to get a job as an environmental educator.
• And last, for NGOs, youth organizations and other related entities applying the training material created by this project: to improve their results in design and implementation of environmental non-formal education programs, address to sensitize youngsters about the role of forests in fighting climate change.