Fighting climate change with CLIMES and climate friendly schools!

Climate change is widely recognised as a major environmental problem facing the planet. Climate change is happening now and in the whole world. Individual, political and institutional actions are necessary to address this threatening problem. Especially the younger generation needs to learn to live sustainably in order to combat climate change and subsequent environmental problems. CLIMES - Climate Friendly Management in European Schools – a Europe-wide project in which die Berater® is the Austrian partner, addresses this challenge, developing a climate-friendly management system for schools.


CLIMES – Climate Friendly Management in European Schools
CLIMES is a practical learning project that develops a concept to tackle the issue of climate change and climate change adaptation. By combining innovative learning approaches and instruments on curricular and extracurricular levels the project contributes to promoting transversal key competences in European school education. Stocktaking and context analysis on existing curricular and extracurricular approaches on learning on climate change in schools have already been carried out. The next step is to set up the Climate Friendly Management System in order to create a contextualised, active learning environment for European Schools.

Main area of activities:
Development of material and methodologies for “climate friendly schools”
Promoting students’ key competences by education for sustainable development

The carbon footprint will be calculated by environmental work groups at partner schools. In the “check” phase all participating schools identify those activities that influence climate change significantly such as:

• Energy use
• Traffic induced by school
• School meals
• Water use
• Waste disposal

Calculating the carbon footprint!
On the basis of the collected data of the “check” phase the pupils of the participating schools calculate regularly their carbon footprint (= total carbon dioxide emissions within a period) by using a well defined carbon footprint calculator.

After the “check” phase activities are planned to reduce the carbon footprint and to adapt to the climate change. An effective action plan is needed! This means to define the climate relevant objectives and targets for the school to be reached within a specified period and to specify a climate change programme with activities, responsibilities as well as necessary resources.
In the “do” phase these activities are to be implemented accordingly. The climate change group checks regularly on their effectiveness and efficiency and, if need be, redefines them.

The first CLIMES newsletter can be downloaded here.
To download the second CLIMES newsletter please click here.