Winners of the Climate Guardians Award - 2022 edition
The first edition of this initiative aims to highlight projects that promote climate education in schools in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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Meet the winners of the Climate Guardians Award for Latin America and the Caribbean!
After having scoured the length and breadth of Latin America and the Caribbean, UNICEF together with MERI Foundation and the Office for Climate Education (OCE), awarded four teachers with the Climate Guardians Award for their work on climate education.
"Environmental education provides students with the right skills and knowledge to cope with a changing climate and offers important opportunities for social mobility. By giving this award, we want to recognize the hard work of teachers in the region as they strive to promote climate action."
A total of 175 projects participated in the award at a regional scale spanning all levels of primary and secondary education.
The awarded categories included school curriculum, educational resources, professional development of teachers, and the role of the school in the context of climate change.
Award-winning projects:
SCHOOL CURRICULUM
"Integrating ocean literacy and environmental education into the Bay Islands school curriculum."
Honduras - Bay Islands
AIM OF THE PROJECT: To develop the first official and compulsory Ocean Culture school curriculum that considers the relationships and interactions between people, their environment, and their culture by using didactic resources designed by teachers working in collaboration with environmental experts, school curriculum, and natural sciences.
RECURSOS EDUCATIVOS
IoT_Water, Greywater treatment plant with electrocoagulation, photocatalytic degradation methods controlled by IoT and Devnet for more sustainable water use in households.
Colombia - Bogotá
AIM OF THE PROJECT: To treat greywater with methods of sedimentation, electrocoagulation, and photocatalytic degradation, controlled by IoT and DevNet, to make the use of water more sustainable in homes from the district of Engativá.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF TEACHERS
MATERIALOTECA | Biomaterials for teaching responsible design.
Argentina - Buenos Aires
AIM OF THE PROJECT: To make and design BIOMATERIALS to provide responsible design solutions. To understand the problem, generate information and explore solutions, thus becoming the protagonists of the result, creating a MATERIALOTECA for other students and professionals so that they can use and/or replicate it.
THE ROLE OF THE SCHOOL IN THE CONTEXT OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Socio-environmental education in schools
Chile - Metropolitan Region
AIM OF THE PROJECT: To propose an innovative education with a socio-environmental and interdisciplinary approach that develops students' skills towards critical thinking and exploring environmental complexities.
"We congratulate the teachers contributing to constructing more resilient societies through climate education."
The award-winning projects were assessed by a multidisciplinary jury at a regional level.
The winning teachers will be representing the region virtually at TeachersCOP, an event broadcast from Egypt prior to COP27, which will bring together the voices of hundreds of teachers from around the world on environmental education to mitigate climate change.
The Climate Guardians Award
The Climate Guardians Award is organized by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) with MERI Fundation and the UNESCO Office for Climate Education.
This award, launched in August 2022, is aimed at pre-primary, primary and secondary school teachers, and seeks to identify and make visible climate education projects from schools in the Latin American and Caribbean region.
The projects must focus on climate education and address one of the following thematic axes:
School curriculum: Inclusion of content, research, and theoretical analysis related to climate change and climate education in the school curriculum for students.
Educational resources: Sequences, projects or school activities based on a practical approach to understanding and recognizing the effects of climate change and the environmental crisis.
Professional development of teachers: Activities, experiences, tools and resources for teachers for climate education training.
The role of the school in the context of climate change: Educational activities related to climate change, developed by the educational institution, that will directly engage the rest of the school community (mothers, fathers, other family members) to become aware of their habits and the effects of these on the climate crisis.
