Welcome to Local Actions
Local Actions are ready-made local activities and lesson plans for academic professionals which link environmental sustainability to core content in their academic disciplines. They are designed to be easily incorporated into existing academic courses, applying their concepts to sustainability solutions.
This website includes resources for International Law, Media and Communication, and Psychology teachers. These fields have plenty of core concepts within their theory that are essential for a multidisciplinary approach on the urgent matters of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. Including sustainability topics in these curriculums is not just for the great examples they provide, but also to expose students to generational challenges they face at an early stage of their studies.
Why?
We want to give young people in our society a sense of agency and ownership of environmental issues and help them feel empowered in making a difference.
The news is full of environmental crises: record breaking temperatures, tropical deforestation, forest fires, water shortages and plastic soups. For many, the problems we face are overwhelming and even disempowering. Surely, individual actions cannot solve climate change, save the rain forests or clean-up our oceans? For many there is a sense of defeatism and anxiety, especially among young people. In short, pessimism rules.
Indeed, the challenges we face are hard-to-fathom and represent wicked problems. They require collective action at a global scale and across disciplinary boundaries. Yet, at a local level changes are happening. Local cooperation and communities often are capable of sustainably managing shared resources in the long term. It is vital that society move from ‘issues’ to ‘action’.
To this end we developed a set of Local Actions: tangible and practical exercises and that students can engage in which deal with environmental issues from a local perspective.
