We needed to ensure that these educational opportunities were accessible, especially to those from disadvantaged social groups who will experience the brunt of the socio/environmental impacts of climate change. We set the following key overall goal for the project: “Upscale and improve our educational programme to better stimulate pro-environmental behaviour in Denmark and Europe, empowering citizens with skills and knowledge to become changemakers, helping to address climate change impacts at the local, national and international levels” To achieve this, we set three interim strategic goals: 1) Establish a training of trainers programme to cascade the learning across our network and civil society. 2) Education Curriculum Development: Increase our knowledge & skills in adult education methodologies which enable learners to translate inspiration into new active citizenship projects that could have a long term social & environmental impact. 3) Train our adult education staff in methods for building cross- sector educational approaches and improve our capacity to reach learners from different socio-economic and cultural spheres. These goals were operationalised into the core EDP project objectives detailed below.
NOAH uses adult education to promote pro-environmental behaviour and active citizenship. Our core concern is the need for civil society and policy makers to take decisive pro- climate action. Denmark has made good progress with EU climate/energy targets. Nevertheless, the global concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere still sets new records. Considering this, it was essential for us to increase public education resources to promote pro-environmental behaviour, supporting local communities to respond to climate challenges in a cohesive and socially inclusive manner. Such adult educational approaches were crucial to our work-which acknowledges the interdependence of social and ecological issues. Educational activities have become an increasingly central aspect of our work. Over the last decade, we have developed our work from the local/regional level, to increasingly working at EU/global level. Growing public engagement with climate issues led us to recognize enormous and growing potential for our educational program. We wanted to support this trend towards environmental awareness and pro- environmental behaviour and increase the agency of this growing active citizenship by providing newcomers with innovative educational support.