Education for Sustainable Development

Dear all,

We hope that you are all well and keep on applying your ECL-knowledge in your daily lives! It has been half a year since you last met in Germany/ Tanzania for your evaluation seminar. It is more than two years of learning and working together under ECL. It is therefore time that we look back for a long-term evaluation. – Would be very helpful if you can fill out the short online questionnaire until June 10th. Thanks!
In ECL-Newsletter No. 6 we give you an update on interesting news and CAN Tanzania & Germanwatch work.

Best wishes!

From April 2017 to November 2018, the “Empowerment for Climate Leadership” project took place. Climate Action Network Tanzania (CAN Tanzania) and Germanwatch invited climate-active Indian, Tanzanian and German youths for exchanges and work on online modules – contextual focus was the empowerment of participants to contribute to their NGOs’ work for progress in the area of SDG implementation. A selection of the intercultural learning methods from the exchange seminars with the aim of a better access to the SDGs and their conveyance is presented here.

“If you are a wise person, you are a learner and an educator!” With this idea, the 3 weeks of exchange within the “Empowerment for Climate Leadership program” (ECL) started in Tanzania, June 2018. 24 young climate activists from India, Tanzania and Germany met there to work and exchange on different ways of implementing the SDGs and Agenda 2030 on local, regional and national level. Here, you find a short recap of some events in the very inspiring first half of the exchange organized by CAN Tanzania...

In 2017, Germanwatch e.V. initiated an international online training course and exchange project on Climate Action for 20 young professionals from India, Tanzania and Germany – the “Empowerment for Climate Leadership”-program (ECL). With this program, the Germanwatch team for Education for Sustainable Development offers a new educational format and represents a pilot project under the umbrella of the African-German Youth Initiative (AGYI) of the African Union Commission (AUC) and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

The project „Empowerment for Climate Leadership“ (ECL) is an extra-occupational 18-months-lasting platform of exchange and training, organized by Climate Action Network (CAN) Tanzania and Germanwatch. ECL supports 20 enthusiastic, climate-active young people, aged 20 to 30 years, who are professionally or voluntarily committed in civil society. Now, the second stage of the ECL-project is initiated

Dr. Jim Taylor, director of environmental education for the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa (WESSA) and & Dr. Mark Graham, director of GroundTruth, report about the consequences of the extreme drought in Cape Town (South Africa) and what kind of positive learn effects this water crisis has - besides the negative impacts.

India faces major environmental challenges with respect to the stress on its natural resources such as biodiversity and water and increased air, water and land pollution. All of these provide major challenges but also opportunities for development considering the path that India would choose to take. The development that is currently seen in the West with its high ecological and carbon footprint is not sustainable. Therefore, the developing countries simultaneously need rapid development, high population, increased aspirations and the need to protect the environment. We need to do this in ways which leapfrog the country to a more sustainable level of development than is visible in any of the models of developed countries today.

With the 17 Global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), all countries in the world have come up with a comprehensive and ambitious agenda for environmental, social and economic sustainable development in an unprecedented UN-led joint negotiation process. In the weltwärts extracurricular exchange project in the context of the Agenda 2030 "Empowerment for Climate Leadership" by Germanwatch and CAN Tanzania, the participants intensively dealt with the Agenda 2030 and the SDGs and exchanged their South-North perspectives.

The international community has agreed several times that climate change must be limited to below 2°C. Many of the most vulnerable countries demand that this upper limit be tightened to 1.5°C to avoid further negative impacts on their populations. These global temperature limits will likely be included in the Paris Agreement as well. But temperature goals are very abstract. Paris will deliver an agreement – but emission reductions have to be realized on national, subnational, local and private levels...

This worksheet begins with a general discussion of the effects of climate change for Germany and China, providing background material on the national contexts. Students are made aware that climate change not only affects the Global South, but that it is already affecting areas of life in all the geographical zones of the world. After this general introduction the focus shifts to the local level, the twin cities of Bonn and Chengdu, allowing students to understand the topic of climate change with reference to a specific, narrowly defined urban context.