Climate Change Awareness Programs by Climate Fact Checks 

Climate Fact Checks primarily focuses on debunking climate change misinformation. However, based on Fact Checking Climate Change Misinformation for over a year our team has discovered that there is a huge lack of awareness among citizens within Sri Lanka. It was evident to us that the lack of awareness often led to the fast spread of climate change misinformation. Hence, the climate fact checks team began to conduct awareness sessions, primarily focusing Youth and School students. 

In previous articles we have dived into topics like “Youth as a Stakeholder in Climate Action” and “Climate Change Education in Sri Lanka”  Today we would like to bring your attention to some of the initiatives taken by Climate Fact Checks to create and expand the awareness on Climate Change among Youth and School students. 

Workshops for Youth

Our team designed a workshop for youth based on the research data we have collected over a year of fact checking climate change misinformation. The main focus area we selected for youth was Media Literacy and Climate Change Misinformation. Youth in the digital generation are tech savvy and are more prone to sharing misinformation regarding climate change if they lack sound awareness on the topic. Hence, CFC decided to couple Media Literacy with Climate Change Misinformation for a 2 hour workshop. In addition we have conducted several River Clean up programs with School Students and Youth in the Mahaweli river around the Polgolla Dam. 

Youth that are undergraduates in both Private and Public Universities or from Youth groups are our main target audience for this workshop. We try to be as interactive as possible to better engage with the audience. We try to use current and relevant examples of misinformation that is viral on social media for our explanations. An activity is also conducted in this workshop; The audience is divided into groups and given a Newspaper Headline/Tweet/Post on Climate Change to verify using scientific data. They will then get the opportunity to present their findings, whether the content they received is fake or a fact. This activity encourages youth to think logically and also present it to a wider audience. This activity aims to give youth the practice of verifying suspicious content regarding climate change that they come across, verifying the truth and explaining it to their peers. We then wrap up the session sharing some tips on how to detect misinformation online and create a network with the youth to keep them informed. 

So far we have conducted our Youth Awareness program for the undergraduates at the University of Kelaniya and KIU campus. We received a positive reception from the participants of both universities. Many of the Youth were not familiar with the term media literacy and had ample knowledge on Climate Change. They found the session very useful and mentioned that it is an area that they are not often exposed to yet is necessary. We collect feedback from Youth to improve our future sessions and also to gain an understanding about the level of awareness on the topic among Youth. 

Climate Change Education Program. 

One major cause for the lack of awareness on climate change among youth is that they were not taught the subject extensively at school. Hence, the CFC team decided to address the root cause of the problem by introducing climate change education to school students. Following our publication on “A SWOT analysis of Climate Change Education in South Asia” at the International Conference on Climate Change; we discovered that it is still at a very preliminary stage within our education system. Climate Change is only included in a Chapter in selected few subjects and the content included is outdated. 

The CFC team began a Climate Change Education (CCE) Program keeping in mind the necessity of creating a future generation that can tackle and be resilient to challenges that may arise in the future due to climate change. The session  targets students between the age groups 12-14. We request for 30 students per session to make it more interactive. The first hour will be a discussion based presentation on Climate Change. Here we cover a basic introduction to Climate Change, The difference between Climate and Weather, What causes climate change, The impacts of climate change, Climate action and resilience.  

During the second one and a half hours, the students will participate in a group activity. The CFC team has put together 6 activity bags containing equipment required to create a DIY Meteorological Instrument. The instruments include Thermometer, Rain Gauge, Barometer, Hygrometer, Weather Vane, and Anemometer. The kids are given the opportunity to be creative while focusing on the basic concepts of how the instrument works. Then they present the instrument they created to their peers and explain how it works. The objective of this exercise is to help young children understand how different weather parameters are measured which will motivate them to actively participate in taking Climate Action. The activity brings the students out of their shells and thinks out of the box. We also received a positive response from the teachers who participated in the sessions. 

We have conducted the CCE program at Hillwood College Kandy and Greenhill International School so far and hope to expand to many more schools in the future. We also obtained approval from the Ministry of Education to conduct this program in public schools. 

In addition to the ongoing session, the CFC team collaborated with the Animation workshop of the VIA University and SCI-VI to create five 1 minute animations about climate change that are more relevant to the Sri Lankan context. We hope to use these animations in the future of our Climate Change Education program.  The aim of creating these animations is to better deliver information about climate change to a younger audience. We hope to launch the animations on World Children’s Day 2023. 

Although Climate Fact Checks was mostly functioning online in the past year, we hope to interact more with the public and create an impactful dialogue among different community groups about climate change and related misinformation.