The “Global Shapers Annual Survey 2017” of the World Economic Forum shows that for young people climate change is the most serious issue affecting the world today (48.8%). While 78.1% said they would be willing to change their lifestyle to protect the environment, concerns about water and healthy food are expressed by 18.2%. Only then, young people are concerned about lack of education (15.9%) and lack of economic opportunity and unemployment (12.1%). The “Friday for Future” demonstrations, which are happening meanwhile nearly all over Europe every Friday, show how serious young people are on climate topics and that they have created their own climate protection movement. It would be a big mistake to classify these young people as truants only without taken into consideration their seriousness in the issue. Climate change and nutrition issues are closely connected, as agriculture is a main contributor to the production of greenhouse gases. Changes in the diet towards more plant-based foods, towards meat from animals with little enteric fermentation, and towards foods processed in an energy-efficient manner offer a challenging and until now little explored area for mitigating climate change. It is necessary to address these problems already at an early stage in youth education and youth work. There is a need of not only raising awareness on the issue of climate change and the impact on nutrition patterns, but provide young people with the necessary competencies to contribute to sustainable way of living. Therefore, the general objective of the project is to give access to successful approaches which train children and adolescents as well as youth educators across Europe to make responsible decisions with regard to actions that affect the climate. They have to become aware of the impact of food on their health and on the climate, and to acquire constructive attitudes about environment and nutrition issues. In order to reach this objective, the specific objectives are 1) To implement an e-platform with an interactive database, searchable after various parameters, that describes and gives access to initiatives, tools and methods and other materials that have been identified and collected in the course of the project. Especially important are good practice in communicating information on climate change to young people, and motivating and empowering them to get involved in issues and decision-making associated with healthy nutrition patterns and climate change. 2) To elaborate a Catalogue “HEALTHY FUTURE 4Y + THE PLANET” which will give an overview about the current situation of the specific project environment in the partners’ countries, i.e. provide effective responses to the climate related consumer and nutrition education needs of young people. The Catalogue will be enriched with the outcomes of the 4 transnational meetings in each partner country where experts from the respective national and local youth organisations will discuss the issue of good practice in communicating information on climate change to young people with the team of our strategic partnership. 3) To organise an online interactive Forum for exchange of experience and good practice that will promote networking and exchange activities not only among the partnership and youth organisations in their countries, but also on a European level. We will highlight the new translation services such as Skype’s real-time translation in 8 spoken and 50 written languages. In this way, it will become possible to break down language barriers between users from different countries, and to support ideas, foster exchange and assist initiatives that contribute to the European society as a whole. The core activities will be the four transnational meetings. The focus will be on meetings with youth and refugee integration workers in each partner country. In these events, the project’s objectives will be presented, as well as the actual state of the identification and selection of best practice examples and the concept of the database. We expect a fruitful exchange of experiences and the intensification of exchange between the project partners and the participants of these events. Altogether, approximately 100 professionals will become first line recipients of the project’s outcomes. The target groups for our project are youth workers and teachers, but also educators for integration of young refugees who also badly need climate, environment and nutrition education, especially in the light of living in a new society. They will participate at the transnational partnership meetings for exchange of experience and/or receive information and best practice about communicating the issues of climate change, habits of nutrition and a healthy lifestyle. The final beneficiaries are children, adolescents, and also young refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who need support in their climate, environment and nutrition education in their new European home country.
Issues raised by climate change are especially important to young people, who in their lifetime will be impacted most by climate change. The educational response to these challenges has been rather inadequate so far; and in particular, adequate innovative practices in communicating climate change linked to nutrition to young people are rarely to be found as we experienced in our search of good practices. We wanted to provide an overview about projects, initiatives and methods that inspire youth educators as well as young people for own activities and train adolescents and youth or school educators across Europe to adopt a climate relevant consumer behaviour and a diet which is based more on plant-based foods, and on food processed in an energy-efficient manner. In addition, the project outcomes should comply with various UN and EU goals concerning climate and food, because we are convinced that it needs collaborative actions to cope with these challenges. Meanwhile (not foreseeable at the application stage of this project!) especially the European Green Deal offers a platform and underlines the relevance of our project’s objectives.
In our application we referred to the “Global Shapers Annual Survey 2017” of the World Economic Forum which showed that for young people climate change was the most serious issue affecting the world today. The “Friday for Future” initiative reflects the seriousness of young people on climate topics. However, though during the last 3 years these topics have not lost in relevance, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and many other threads we clearly recognized shifts in awareness. Nobody can argue any more against that climate change and nutrition issues are closely connected as agriculture is a main contributor for the production of greenhouse gases. Issues connected to that became even more obvious during the last months due to the geopolitical situation with the Russian War with Ukraine but it is still true that changes in the diet towards more plant-based foods and towards foods processed in an energy-efficient manner offer a promising area for mitigating climate change. Besides raising awareness on the issue of climate change and the impact on nutrition patterns, young people have to be provided with the access to knowledge and competencies to contribute to sustainable ways of living.