IFAD social reporting blog

By Andrea Listanti

Youth power Photo credit: Andrea Listanti

At Terra Madre Youth, we spent three days learning about agriculture and food production, listening to stories from rural people from all around the world, and sharing our thoughts with each other. On the fourth and final day, we brought our energy and our passion to Expo. Expo 2015 with the theme of "Feeding the world, energy for life" was the perfect venue to spread the word on food and agriculture. As youth, we feel responsible to advocate for a change. Our message was that a new, sustainable global food production system is possible and we need to work on it together.

In the spare minutes before the wrap-up meeting in the Auditorium, we took the opportunity to visit the Holy See pavilion. We entered a quite small and solemn square room, with images and videos on the walls and a long rectangular table in the middle. Pictures from different parts of the world showed the devastating impact of hunger, malnutrition and food waste. These pictures made a tremendous impression and made us reflect on the contradictions and inequalities of our world.

Photo credit: Andrea Listanti

Scenes of everyday life came to life when people got close to the rectangular table. A lady explained to us that the table would have lost its meaning without people. This was a profound message, as a table is where families come together to eat, it is a place where people come together to meet and interact with each other. We thought of the importance of food in this process, remembering when we had shared our lunch with our companions on the first day around a table, and we realized that if every pavilion had been like the one we were visiting, Expo would have been an even better experience.

At the wrap-up meeting, Carlo Petrini addressing the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Paolo Gentiloni said: “you have come to the United Nations of young farmers”. Then he gave us a fascinating explanation of the word “sustainability”: “it derives from ‘sustain’, which is actually one of the pedals of the piano. If you push it with your foot while playing, the sound lasts more. We want Slow Food’s activity to be long-lasting, and we want you to do better than the founders”. At the end of his speech, Petrini endorsed Alice Waters’ proposal to organize the first ever Terra Madre event in the United States, and announced the next Indigenous Terra Madre for 3-7 November 2015 in India.

Gentiloni was the last to take the floor. “The message of feeding the planet is extraordinarily political”, he said, and he underlined the connection between Terra Madre Youth and the COP21 Climate Conference which will be taking place in Paris in December 2015. “There’s a fil rouge linking these two events: the way we are going to feed the planet in the future depends on the way we will tackle challenges poses to agriculture”. In listening to his words, we hope that governments will also take into account the message we were trying to convey.

Photo credit: Andrea Listanti

At the end of the meeting, Joris Lohman, chief of the Slow Food Youth Network, led the final march. United, we "invaded" Expo grounds! We walked down the “decumano”, singing and showing our posters. And must say we felt very powerful, we thorough enjoyed the surprised look of Expo visitors.

For many of us, being on the frontline for four days as IFAD young delegates was the best training we could have received, and we hope that IFAD  will continue to create opportunities for the young people to be more and more involved in these kind of activities in the future.

As appeared on UN:CC learn

8 December 2014, Lima, Peru. An unusual side event at the annual Climate Conference in Lima (COP 20) provided a snapshot of what the United Nations is doing to support climate change education and training for children, youth and adults. Panellists and participants discussed how learning can actually ‘make a difference’ on the ground as well as the role of formal, non-formal and informal approaches. The audience also actively engaged in a game on climate risk management animated by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre (RCCC). The event was hosted by UNEP, UNITAR, UNESCO, UNICEF, FAO, and IFAD in collaboration with YOUNGO. It was moderated by Mr. Daniel Abreu, National UN CC:Learn Focal Point at the National Climate Change Council (CNCCMDL) of the Dominican Republic.

The event was opened with a photo series featuring “Voices from the COP” on why education and training is important, collected by YOUNGO. ©UNCC:Learn

In his welcome remarks, Mr. Angus Mackay, Manager at UNITAR’s Climate Change Programme pointed out that funding and programmes on sustainability issues is at an ‘all time high’ and that especially young people have never been so aware of sustainability issues. “However, actual behaviour change is not following automatically. We need to make sure that programmes actually lead to measurable results, including effective monitoring and evaluation,” he said, referring to a recent publication by FAO (“Making It Count: Increasing the Impact of Climate Change and Food Security Education Programmes”). The event featured three case examples illustrating UN projects and programmes for different age groups: beginning with climate change education for children; to empowering youth to take action on climate change; to professional training for adults. Ms. Mariana Alcalay, Education Project Officer at the UNESCO Office in Brazil introduced a pilot project for training teachers on climate change education for sustainable development in the State of Santa Catarina. Ms. Alcalay highlighted that as a result of the programme children are not only showing keen interest in climate change related issues, but are also taking the message out to their communities.

Mr. Brighton Kaoma from Zambia, who connected via Skype, talked about a youth movement that has been inspired by the UNICEF-supported Unite4Climate programme. Mr. Kaoma underlined that “Unite4Climate aims to inspire the leadership aspect that’s embedded in every young person.” In Zambia alone, over 1,000 youth have been trained on locally relevant solutions to address climate change and environmental problems.

Mr. Naysan Sahba, Director of UNEP's Division of Communications and Public Information, presented the Partnership for Environment and Disaster Risk Reduction (PEDRR) which offers a range of training activities for professionals, including national courses and regional train-the-trainer workshops. The latest learning activity offered by PEDRR is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on ecosystem-based solutions for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Mr. Sahba announced that “our target is to reach out to 1 million people over the next five years.”

One UN for education and training: Ms. Amrei Horstbrink, UNITAR; Mr. Naysan Sahba and Ms. Fanina Kodre UNEP; Mr. Angus Mackay, UNITAR; Mr. Daniel Abreu, Dominican Republic; Mr. Maarten Van Aalst, Red Cross; Ms. Ilaria Firmian, IFAD; Mr. Alex Heikens and Ms. Cristina Colon, UNICEF; Mr. Sessa Reuben, FAO; and Ms. Mariana Alcalay and Ms. Julia Heiss, UNESCO (from left to right). ©UNCC:Learn

The highlight of the event was a climate risk management game that involved the entire audience in an active exercise on decision-making under time pressure. Participants were asked to split up in groups and decide on whether to invest in flood protection or not. A die was thrown to determine whether a flood happened (number 6) or not (numbers 1-5). “To illustrate the effect of climate change, we change to a different die with higher probabilities of throwing a six, meaning a flood,” Mr. Maarten Van Aalst, Director of the RCCC, explained. “We have played this game in various settings, including the White House. For the IPCC authors we asked them to use their own report to inform their decision-making. Made them think quite a bit…”, Mr. Van Aalst jokingly said.

The game has been also used in the framework of IFAD’s Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture (ASAP) projects. “Traditional training approaches don’t always work at the community level. We need to break down complex concepts such as climate risk management and make them relevant to local planning contexts”, Ms. Ilaria Firmian from IFAD highlighted. “The game is not only fun, but speeds up learning, dialogue and action on climate risks.”

©UNCC:Learn

Mr. Daniel Abreu summarized the discussions by pointing to the importance of results-based training, the role of non-formal education in reaching out to people that are not part of the formal education system, and the need for life-long learning on climate change issues. “This is actually the approach we are taking in the Dominican Republic”, Mr. Abreu pointed out. “In our national climate change learning strategy we have set out a vision of strengthening climate change education at all levels, from schools, to universities, to professional training centers, but also working with civil society and the media,” he said. “This approach is relevant not only for developing, but also for developed countries!”

Examples of UN initiatives and resources for climate change education and training
The One UN Climate Change Learning Partnership (UN CC:Learn)
Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development (CCESD)
Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Ecosystem-Based Solutions for Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation
FAO Food Security and Climate Change Challenge Badge
IFAD e-Learning Course on Smallholder Agriculture, Environment and Climate Change
UNICEF Unite4Climate Zambia
IFRC/Red Cross Red Crescent games on climate risk management

The ingredients for a climate game: a few dice, some red stones and  a handful of beans. With these simple tools, the Netherlands Red Cross team gave a great simulation yesterday of the choices smallholders face in a highly uncertain environment. “As climate scientists we realised that only spreading climate change models was not very useful to the people most affected. You need to inform people on what they can do to protect themselves from climate-related disasters. How can they deal with climate risks with incomplete information?” said Maarten van Aalst.





The game showed in a fun and interactive way that climate change adaptation is full of challenges and uncertainties. Even though the participants all knew that floods may have large impacts on their villages – they  wondered why invest in risk reduction, when they did not know if a disaster would actually hit their village. It was therefore quite attractive to spend money on short term benefits: you could only spend your money once. 

 “Although this game is a simplified version of reality, it sheds light on some of the factors that play out in our real-world project portfolio” said Gernot Laganda, Programme Coordinator for IFAD’s Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP). “Some of our investments are carried away by floods, and project budgets need to be reconfigured to accommodate repair and restoration efforts. Being aware of climate risks before investing allows us to programme more resilient rural development projects.”

“Through ASAP, we introduce disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation measures into IFAD-supported development projects. These measures range from landscape-level interventions, such as watershed afforestation and the restoration of coastal greenbelts, to communal investments in early warning systems, more robust storage infrastructure and salt- or heat-tolerant crop varieties”.

The Red Cross game showed that decision making in relation to climate change and risk management, is quite a difficult task. Even when the will and knowledge to act is there: risks are complex to deal with in a world where money is scarce.