Cultivating Conditions for Change: the evolution of Climate Smart

The roots of Climate Smart 

Five years ago in 2019, Stephan Hügel and I walked into Ringsend Community College, a secondary school located in the East inner city of Dublin. Uniquely located at the confluence of the river Liffey which runs through the capital, the Dodder river which circumvents the south inner city, and Dublin Bay, the area and its population are facing pressures from increasing floods from all sides as well as gentrification pressures emerging from the redeveloped Docklands replete with high-tech companies.

Supported by seed funding from Science Foundation Ireland and a Marie Curie Award, we were exploring how we could engage citizens around climate change utilising smart, digital technologies and the water was drawing us in. The Ringsend community has a long history of engaging with its watery surroundings. Indeed historically it was a vibrant fishing village commonly known as Ray town due to the popularity of “Ringsend Ray” or stingray, but in recent decades the area had experienced more floods than stingray catches.

Initial plans for Climate Smart

Our original vision for Climate Smart was a face-to-face workshop co-designed by, with and for young people in the Transition Year of school, where students are generally between the ages of 15 and 16. This is a year which bridges two formal educational cycles in Ireland, the junior cycle and the senior cycle. This year is designed to support students to transition to more independent learning which is required in the final phase of secondary school. In particular, the Transition Year aims to support self-directed learning alongside general, technical, academic, and work-related skills building self-confidence without the pressure of examinations.

Our first workshop was great fun! Stephan created a simple, bespoke activity where students could locate their homes on a map of Ringsend and run flood scenarios for 2050 to see if their homes were affected. This exercise stimulated much discussion and debate. The students really engaged and tricky discussions of climate justice, citizenship and their futures ensued. Off the back of this response, we thought the serious games approach could work well, countering the often depressing elements of climate change impacts with positive action and even enjoyment. Working with the insights we got from games designers, climate scientists, students and policy shapers we developed a prototype of what was to become the iAdapt serious game. Taking this back to Ringsend Community College we trialled and revised our ideas.  Then COVID hit.

Pivoting online during COVID

Pivoting online, as all education had to do during the pandemic, we reflected on what we achieved and where we should go next. Seeking a silver lining in the face of huge disruption caused by COVID-19 we thought that our initially placed based activity in Ringsend could have wider application. However, scaling out our ambitions without face-to-face facilitated workshops by us meant we had to develop additional material to provide basic concepts of climate change and climate change adaptation as well as contextualise the game itself and so the Climate Smart Platform was born.

Expanding Climate Smart

Launched for piloting in January 2022 we worked with 10 schools in Dublin located in areas with diverse socio-economic characteristics. Revising materials from this pilot, we expanded Climate Smart even further in 2023, joining forces with An Taisce’s Environmental Education Unit and developing another pathway through the platform centred around Cork, as well as getting materials translated into Irish so that Irish language schools could also engage with it.

By the summer of 2024, 79 schools and more than 3000 students had completed the module, with many more engaging with game play and demonstrations sessions. In order to make the intervention as flexible and accessible as possible, we are now developing two board games inspired by iAdapt and converting the online learning materials into a textbook, to give teachers and students options about how they wish to learn, whether in the classroom or online, collectively as a class or individually.

While the platform was specifically designed to bring climate change ‘home’ to Irish students in Dublin, and subsequently in Cork, the module has been followed by schools across Ireland indicating it has traction beyond these areas. Indeed, the Climate Smart approach to climate change adaptation education has the potential to be replicated across many locations experiencing increased flood effects from climate change.

What is clear is that teachers and students desperately need more educational supports around climate change, and in particular climate change adaptation. Developing adaptive capacity and capabilities to act on that capacity are essential.  We are delighted to be part of a movement of education on climate change.