Empowering youngsters: Climate high school assemblies to increase risk perception and awareness

EMPOCLIM is a project that aims to raise awareness and involve young people in sustainable development through school climate assemblies at five educational centers in Camp de Tarragona, Spain. Thanks to innovative democratic processes designed to learn, deliberate, and decide in an assembly way, the students look for solutions to climate change, proposing actions to promote sustainability at the local and regional levels.

EMPOCLIM emphasizes strengthening environmental awareness and empowering young people through education, recognizing their potential to become ambassadors and agents of change for climate action and sustainable development in their environment, and sharing knowledge and experiences with their families, local communities, and policymakers.

As a result of the climate assemblies, a generation of an action plan and political recommendations by the participating educational communities to achieve the 2 SDGs Climate action and affordable and clean energy at the local and regional levels is obtained.

Parallelly EMPOCLIM project has developed two didactic guides for teachers to work with the knowledge involved with two specific SDGs (the two mentioned before).

Once the EMPOCLIM project was finished, the methodology established continued to be implemented in the high schools on demand, as University Rovira i Virgili offered this Workshop as one that transfers university information to high schools. In the future, EMPOCLIM will probably evolve up-scaled in different national and European proposals and to other educational levels.

We acknowledge  Diputació Provincial de Tarragona for funding the EMPOCLIM project.