‘I saw the pain of being away from a home that you did not choose to leave,’ Vicki Arroyo wrote last year in The Guardian. Anywhere in the world we have to prepare for such involuntary displacements as climate change is already here, is the key message Executive Director of the Georgetown Climate Center of Georgetown University Law Center. In this TED talk she explains how.
Arroyo, a native from New Orleans, witnessed how her family lost their homes in the flooding caused by hurricane Katrina. ‘My sister said that losing her cherished New Orleans life and being thrown into mine in the Washington, DC area was like being in the witness protection programme,’ she wrote in The Guardian.
The TED talk Arroyo delivered earlier is one of many links to reliable articles and other background material in the extensive resources pack our research partner STBY compiled for the WDCD Climate Action Challenge. Participants in the challenge can use this collection of authoritative resources to get their facts right and find inspiration before they start working on their entries.
Authoritative resources
The ten-page document that is part of the starters kit offers a multitude of links to articles and websites with general background information, and facts & figures, as well as more specific information on the topics of food, water, health, housing, and energy in relation to climate change. Added are also a great lot of best practices of adaptation to the effects of the changing climate that might serve as inspiration. This goes from the Mountain Resiliency Project in Nepal and a successful hydroponics project in Kenya to 350.org’s Artivism projects and the Climate CoLab, which enables people from all over the world to collaborate on climate action.
Ideation workshops
If you’re in London or Amsterdam next week, you’re in luck – on 27 June and 29 June respectively, STBY will host two Climate Action workshops aimed at coming up with ideas to submit to the challenge. This is your chance to pick the brains of the experts, who will guide you through brainstorming, ideation, prototyping, and pitching. All kinds of creatives are welcome — from service and system designers to architects, developers and strategists. Interested? Learn more about the Climate Action Challenge and submit your ideas before 21 August!