CIVIL society groups from Jamaica, Bangladesh, India, South Africa, and Germany were the main participants in an innovative international climate education workshop to explore the use of live satellite imagery to produce climate material to encourage North-South dialogue.

“The workshop aimed at exchanging experiences from educational work in the South and in the North in order to jointly create new educational material on Climate Change,” said Alexander Reif, policy officer, education for sustainable development at Germanwatch, the institution that organised the workshop.

Germanwatch has over the past 10 years successfully implemented an educational intervention in German schools, which compares live satellite pictures with archived footage of the earth to highlight climate change impacts.

Dubbed the Germanwatch Climate Expedition, it incorporates the use of thematic and regional samples of satellite pictures as well as current socio-economic challenges of climate change for educational purposes.

One particular theme of focus has been strengthening messages linking climate adaptation and mitigation. Many developed countries have been focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions (mitigation) while some developing countries, like the Caribbean, have been looking at how to cope with the extreme climate impacts they are experiencing (adaptation).

These messages will seek to bridge the educational gap between developing and developed countries.

“Building on our experience from the Germanwatch Climate Expedition and possibly the partners’ climate change education tools, existing educational material will jointly be revised,” Reif said in a document on the workshop. “In a dialogue, we will further develop elements of the Germanwatch Climate Expedition in order to make it useful for educational work in the South and North, creating an understanding for other regions’ challenges.”

Indi Mclymont Lafayette, Regional Coordinator, Panos Caribbean, who attended the workshop from Jamaica, said it was a fruitful engagement.

“All the participants learnt a lot. There are very strong options for us to collaborate and share our work. We are looking forward to some good outputs by March 2014,” she said.

Panos Caribbean is a non-government organisation, which uses communication as a tool for development. It has offices in Haiti and Jamaica and its Voices for Climate Change Education Project was in 2011 named a United Nations Communication Best Practice.

The workshop was held just two days ahead of the UN Climate Talks, which opened on November 11.

One of the issues at the talks has been increased focus on Article 6, which promotes increased public education for climate change. At the 2012 UN talks held in Doha, countries recognised “that a goal of education is to promote changes in lifestyles, attitudes and behaviour needed to foster sustainable development and to prepare children, youth, women, persons with disabilities and grass-root communities to adapt to the impacts of climate change”.

As an outcome of the workshop, the organisations will work with experts of satellite-based educational work to produce educational modules on climate change.

The modules will be drafted in Germany by Germanwatch, with input from the other organisations. They will be compiled on DVD and distributed for educational work in countries of the ‘Global South’.