Coordinated Civic Education (CCE) (Buckland et al 2018, J. Env. Studies and Sciences https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-018-0473-x ) is an approach to educate large numbers of people for civic leadership and collective democratic action. Power Dialogs are a tool to mobilize educators to provide young people with realistic optimism that for fundamental economic reasons, the world is heading towards an energy system powered by 100% renewables.
Students and community members can use their power to accelerate market trends towards renewable power, and put countries across the world in a position to solve the energy half of climate change by 2030. Key actions to do this will be at the subnational, state and local levels: setting ambitious goals and policies, and clearing away barriers.
We developed a CCE project to educate thousands of college and high school students about climate solutions and climate justice and to inspire and empower them to take action.
Results/Conclusions
On April 7, 2020, universities and colleges in 45 states,Puerto Rico and Washington DC and in 5 other nations held Power Dialogs - webinars on climate solutions, clean energy and climate justice. The Dialogs featured local experts who identified feasible actions to “SolveClimateby2030”.Each webinar was organized by a faculty member, staff or student. Leading a webinar enabled them to step into new roles as convenors of climate education. They identified and recruited diverse speakers – governors, legislators, regulators, researchers, educators, students, and activists.
The Dialogs were planned to be in-person events that would be shown on many campuses to live groups of students and faculty and community members. With the onset of covid-19, the project transitioned to an online-only format. Although less interactive than intended, the webinars engaged 5,000 – 10,000 participants directly.
The webinars were recorded and posted, providing an opportunity for online education to #MakeClimateaClass. We developed teachers guides for one-hour follow-on discussion in 25 subjects ranging from art, history, political science, engineering, natural sciences, art, music, economics and more.
60 virtual interns promoted the project on social media and produced promotional videos. Thousands of people have viewed recorded webinars.
www.solveClimateby2030.org contains information and links to each webinar as well as a variety of climate and energy resources.
The project is led by the Center for Environmental Policy at Bard College in partnership with the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and a variety of other organizations. In 2021 the project will be expanded to more international universities.