Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

Einstein said it: No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. The Climate Collage project consists in thrusting a worldwide, exponentially growing and self-sustainable education campaign on climate change, aimed at enacting a change in the way people consider, understand, and act on humanity‚ impacts on climate. The campaign is based on a fun, participatory and creative workshop (the Climate Collage workshop) using collective intelligence, see video presentation of the workshop in section 22. The strength of the project relies in the socially contagious behaviour of the workshop already demonstrated worldwide.

How Project Affects Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions:

While there is widespread agreement that the transition towards a low-carbon economy needs the support of governments and big business, the sustainability-related choices each individual makes can clearly have a large impact, towards reducing global GHG emissions. The response suggested by the present project is the rapid diffusion of quality climate change education through a socially contagious learning approach that raises awareness and understanding about climate change and triggers behavioural change for positive climate action at individual and collective levels. Through the deployment the workshop, the Climate Collage project aims providing people (a) the required knowledge, skills and attitude to take informed actions for climate change mitigation and adaptation and (b) the means to transmit that knowledge to others by becoming facilitators of this fun and accessible workshop. The Climate Collage workshop allows participants to understand and visualize all complex interconnections between the different elements of climate change (causes, mechanisms, consequences and feedback loops). This clarification of the problem enables participants to take informed positive actions and collectively form an opinion on the changes to be made. Thanks to the workshop‚ transformative approach, this complementarity of learning by doing, creativity and the sharing of personal emotions and positions accelerate the willingness to act and the desire to do it collectively. This group effect invites everyone to go beyond individual considerations, and contributes to cleaning up the public debate through a common perception of the climate risk. According to the current operational and statistical experience, 5% of the participants become facilitators of the Climate Collage workshop and each of them delivers the workshop to about twenty other citizens during the following year. Among those newly reached citizens, 5% will become facilitators and so on. Through this contagious transmission of knowledge, the Climate Collage project generates a tremendous and self-sustainable snowball effect. In only two years of existence, more than 5,000 people worldwide have become facilitators, and through their cumulative efforts 100,000 participants have taken part in a Climate Collage workshop. The next milestone is to reach 1,000,000 participants and the KCP will help reach this target as quickly as possible. A relatively straightforward way to define the impact of the Climate Collage project on humanity‚ GHG emission reductions is the sum of the impact of all the informed actions undertaken by people that have gained understanding of the situation thanks to the Climate Collage workshop. An attempt to quantify these emission reductions will be made in the next sections.

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Impact on Underrepresented Groups:

The Climate Collage empowers people regardless of their gender, age, origins, etc. It aims at raising awareness, enabling better understanding of complex issues for all parties involved and building their capacity to contribute effectively. Moreover it addresses stakeholder perceptions of risks and impacts, and helps to develop measures to reduce negative impacts and increase benefits for all stakeholder groups, including the most vulnerable. 
The workshop is accessible to anyone from 12 years old to 99+, from any social and educational background. The face-to-face version of the workshop only requires a set of 42 cards and a flat surface (table, ground, white board, etc.) making it easy to deliver in any type of context. The online version of the workshop guarantees accessibility for participants to take part no matter where they live or in time of pandemic. The workshops are delivered by volunteering facilitators, thus the participation is free most of the time, reducing the financial barrier to the minimum. Costs range from 0 to 10‚Ç¨ depending on a number of parameters (rented room, online platform fees, etc.). Through its accessibility and replicability, the Climate Collage workshop has created a fantastic opportunity for individuals willing to act on a large scale to meet the climate emergency challenge through education. Moreover, these workshops systematically involve people of different ages and lead to fruitful intergenerational dialogues on actions and behavioural change for sustainable development. 
The variability of profiles of the international representatives illustrates well the inclusive aspect of this empowering tool. Here are a couple of examples: Sophia Cheng, representative in the UK, Katharina Haas, student and representative in Austria, Kadi Ristkok, representative in Estonia, Leonardo Werneck, representative in Brazil, Hemavathi Shekhar, representative in India, Martim Grange representative in Portugal, Pete Bernhardt, representative in New Zealand. 
The material and pedagogical accessibility of the workshop combined with its Creative Commons open-access license guarantee that anyone can take part to or organise a workshop, anytime, anywhere, to collectively understand this global threat.

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