In broad terms, the project aimed to meet the needs of teachers and young people described above by generating tools, techniques and resources for teaching climate change and promoting them to as wide an audience as possible. We set three specific objectives in our application: firstly, to offer schools a focus for their climate change awareness and teaching; secondly, to improve understanding of the facts about climate change and to enable schools to respond creatively using journalism, activism and art and, finally, to provide students and educators with live, web-based, transnational opportunities to deepen their knowledge of the climate crisis and to develop key skills. The extent to which these objectives were realised is discussed below. Beyond these aims, the partners also anticipated the project would contribute to several organisational goals. For News Decoder, this included audience growth particular in the climate education domain and generation of new interest in their other programming. For Climate Academy, aims included profile-raising as it established itself as an independent NGO, increased audiences and a larger platform for its climate education advocacy work. How far these aims were achieved in discussed below.
The two partners devised this project in response to a shared concern around the lack of resources and limited strategies for teachers and schools across Europe to effectively integrate climate change education into their teaching. Our aim was to produce a series of stimulating, cross-curricular teaching resources to build students' understanding of the facts of climate change and to encourage them to respond creatively using journalism, activism and art. In so doing, we have sought to address both the needs of teachers who wish to engage in climate teaching but lack resources, institutional support and knowledge to do so, and the needs of young people for whom the climate crisis ranks as one of their primary concerns but who feel both under-informed and disempowered to take action.