What Can Schools Do?
LEARN & EDUCATE
Schools can play a very important role in making students and their parents aware of individual contributions to climate change, and the ways in which one can reduce global warming.
Share the 1.5°C Living Children’s book with your students.


If you are interested in inviting IGES experts to organise workshops, pilot programs or create a 1.5°C Lifestyles guide for your school,
please contact us at: [email protected]
School Seminars
Student Views on 1.5°C Lifestyles
In considering actions to move towards a decarbonized lifestyle in 2050, we should respect childrens’ decisions about their lifestyles, since they will be the main actors of this lifestyle in 2050. Therefore, the choices made by children will be very important triggers for the promotion of such lifestyles. IGES conducted a series of 9 participatory workshops of 75 minutes each with about 300 children aged 13-15 at a public junior high school in Yokohama. During the workshop, workshop facilitators from IGES requested the children to think and discuss what kind of lifestyle they would like to adopt and how to achieve it, with the aim of a zero-carbon society in 2050.
The methodology for the participatory process designed and applied in a series of workshops for adults was carefully tailored to the children aged 13-15, especially in explaining the impact of lifestyle choices on global warming and the concept of lifestyle related carbon footprints, as well as how everyday decisions and actions are linked to solving the problem of global warming. Since children are largely dependent on the lifestyles of their families, they are less able than adults to make decisions about their own lifestyles. IGES’ team presented a range of lifestyle choices that children should be able to consider, as well as a limited number of lifestyle choices they were likely to consider, and then asked them to think about which lifestyle choices they would be more or less likely to implement. The results showed that overall, regardless of grade, children were more likely to be comfortable with the long-term use of products and less likely to be comfortable with vegetarianism, which is different from adults.