Six groups of young people from different high schools and cities had signed up for the Climate Action Lab on Thursday and Friday, November 24th and 25th. An event held by ActionAid Denmark under the ActJust project. Here, the young people had to find local climate challenges and through the design model ‘Design for Change’ try to come up with a solution for a specific challenge.
Project coordinator, Katrine Grothe, says: ‘Design for Change’ is a simple model where the participants are guided through simple exercises to identify a problem which they then jointly find and create solutions for. The exercises are organized so that they challenge the participants to think in new ways and be active throughout the process’.
They played, built, and thought creatively all day long, and when Thursday ended, all groups had found a solution and were working on making a cool presentation that they could pitch to the judges on Friday. The judging panel consisted of Peter Christiansen, National Director at ActionAid Denmark, Mathias Molbech Lund, Specialist at Technological Institute, and Ingrid Hejslet Larsen from the Green Youth Movement. Among the many presentations were i.a. ideas for better sustainable cycling in Copenhagen. A food park in Nyborg providing more local food and creating a teaching space for children. An app universe that provides consumers with a complete collection of food waste tips – Both good advice on how to place your foods in the fridge to extend freshness, to a recipe collection, which helps you use your ingredients. There were many good and very innovating ideas. The energy level was high. Everybody just wanted to find solutions that would make a difference for the climate challenges we are facing in Europe.
Katrine Grothe confirms, Climate change is important to many young people, but it also creates anxiety and powerlessness. In ActionAid Denmark, we are part of an EU-funded project that aims to bring together young people from all over Europe and give them concrete opportunities to act and create solutions to some of the challenges we face when it comes to the climate.
The winning team, a group from Svendborg, focused on food. They wanted to create a local supermarket restaurant, where all the discarded food from the supermarket was made into cheap and delicious dishes for the consumer. Well done. The group from Svendborg will go to Vienna in Austria in February, where all the winners from the various Climate Action Labs around Europe will meet, to look at the European climate challenges.
