What are the most urgent environmental challenges in your city/region? What could be done to reduce the effects of these challenges? Are there local initiatives for environmental protection? How can they be made more inclusive and attractive to the local community?
These were some of the questions discussed during two meetings organised in July as part of the GEA project, in order to identify the major environmental challenges perceived by local communities, the availability of initiatives in favour of environmental protection, the levels of knowledge of citizen science, and the quality of environmental education for adults at local level.
In order to explore these issues, through the active involvement of adult educators and representatives of local communities, CESIE organised two discussion groups:
- Environmental Education and Active Participation, 13 July, at Palma Nana, a cooperative expert in environmental education: the meeting allowed to deepen the concept of citizen science, share experiences (e.g. through the ReWildFires project), analyse the main environmental challenges at local level, and reflect together on the strengths and main difficulties of some environmental initiatives at local and national level;
- Environmental challenges and local initiatives: potentials of the Holistic Pasture Management system and Citizen Science, 19 July, in Collesano, in collaboration with AgroMini, a startup promoting regenerative agriculture in Sicily and Italy: after an introduction about the holistic pasture management method, the event fostered a discussion with breeders and farmers from the Madonie area, who shared their concerns about the economic challenges caused by the destruction of crops due to the invasion of wild boar and deer.
Despite the specific topics discussed during the two events, a common thread is easily identified in the desire of the local communities to actively contribute to a real change towards greater environmental sustainability of our daily actions and towards the adoption of practices that can help solve local economic challenges, such as the overpopulation of allochthonous wildlife introduced in the Madonie territories.
The information that emerged from the discussion with the participants is of fundamental importance for the development of the next resources of the GEA project: a report on the main environmental challenges and actions in the countries of the project partners, and an online training programme for adult educators in the field of promoting environmental actions at the community level.
Would you like to learn more or participate to the project’s activities? Do not hesitate to contact Simona Sglavo: simona.sglavo@cesie.org
About the project
GEA – Growing into Eco-conscious Adults is a project funded by the program Erasmus+ KA2 – Cooperation Partnership in Adult education.
Partners
- CESIE (Italy, coordinator)
- EUROGEO (Belgium)
- Symplexis (Greece)
- Cuiablue OÜ (Estonia)
- BUPNET (Germany)
- Eco Logic (Macedonia)
- Xwhy (UAB Theoria) (Lithuania)
For further information
Read more about GEA, visit the web site https://geaeducation.eu/ and follow us on Facebook.
Contact Simona Sglavo: simona.sglavo@cesie.org.
