Climate-related community learning

The health and wellbeing of many communities is inextricably linked to the ocean. I am interested in strategies that communities already use as they adjust to fluctuations in weather and climate. How much do strategies such as environmental monitoring, a strong biological understanding of the local environment, local ecological knowledge, and support for teachers, result in a strengthened capacity of communities to adjust to climate change?

As a graduate student I developed a project with the Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL), Pohnpei Teachers Learning Community (PTLC), and 5 other students on adaptive capacity to climate variability through learning networks. In most years the island Pohnpei in Micronesia (FSM) has high rainfall, but strong El Niño events cause severe drought on the island. These events happen infrequently – every ~13 years – but are forecast up to 3 months in advance and are well known by local environmental experts, community leaders, and resource managers. During the strong El Niño event in 2015-2016, a drought took many people by surprise and water resources were depleted quickly on the island. We were interested in learning how information about drought and climate was communicated within the local community, and the role of teachers in this exchange of knowledge.

To learn about the role of elementary school teachers in information exchange within the local climate knowledge network, we did the following. 1) We identified and interviewed community members, including local environmental experts, community leaders, and resource managers. 2) We facilitated a 2-day teacher workshops in 2016 and 2017 that included a community forum and educational activities that the teachers could use with their students. 3)We then developed a series of videos of demos on climate variability and change that could be adapted by teachers to use in their classroom (Bolden, Seroy, Roberts et al. 2018 Climate Risk Management)