SEAE Research Seminar Series: Three Stories of Organising Climate Action

You are invited to our next SEAE Seminar Series event on Thursday, 20th March 2025.

The SEAE Research Centre Seminar Series promotes scholarly dialogue about transformational approaches that facilitate opportunities for profound change in education & research.

Abstract

The presentation will examine the difficulties in communicating climate change, coupled with uncertainties about the efficacy of local actions, through the presenter’s own experience. His experience is divided into three phases. In 2019–2020, he joined a network of climate-concerned citizens and participated in their public protests. Realizing the lack of public response to the issue, he sought to highlight the stories of individuals already living sustainably. This approach did not generate much interest but led him to focus on concrete actions rather than just the problems. In the second phase (2021–2022), during the pandemic, he ran a low-carbon diet workshop where teenage participants calculated the carbon emissions of their food, experimented with plant-based diets, and reflected on the impact of these changes. Although online workshops eventually lost public interest, this experience gave him the confidence to initiate a mid-term action plan with the small team he had assembled. In 2023-2024, he organized a project to design an urban forest, visit an arboretum, and raise a small grassroots fund to establish an urban forest featuring rare and native tree species. The project successfully planted approximately 450 trees on a 200-square-meter plot of land, which has since become the center of the group’s activities as they continue to care for the forest. In early 2025, he launched a collaboration with several cultural activists to creatively imagine an alternative, sustainable future through an exhibition and/or publication.