Our Projects
June 2021 – May 2024
Project Partners
Advancing Climate Democracy in Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad & Tobago
An exciting multi-country project which allowed for an overall increase in climate education, awareness and action in Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad & Tobago.
Advancing Climate Democracy in Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad & Tobago was a Caribbean project carried out over 3 years, which was developed to increase public awareness and engagement on climate change issues through innovative online platforms and offline citizen engagement strategies and policy development efforts across the project countries. The project was both effective, as well as a lot of fun. Just ask our Climate Champions! In this project, we combined education, advocacy, and interactive digital tools through multi-pronged “online” and “offline” approaches to empower the average citizen (like you and I), so we could better influence climate-related policy. For this project we believed that for real climate democracy we needed interactive and effective climate education, because with a higher level of education in our populations we can dialogue, demand and discuss priorities better. This is where the fun started. In each country we had several educational campaigns, including our signature “Climate Talk” events – where the project entailed 100+ such events across the countries over the 3-year period. While the Climate Talks played a critical role supporting youth training, mostly in schools and relevant public events, public education campaigns were also undertaken which included a suite of educational videos across a range of key environmental and climate topics all relating to Caribbean countries.
In addition, a milestone achievement for the project was the development of a novel civil-parliamentary approach pertaining to climate, which through its ground up efforts that would not have happened without the project, led to development various forms of direct contribution from civil society into Parliamentary recommendations and briefs across all three (3) of the countries. It isn’t everyday that citizens have the chance to brainstorm on their most important climate concerns and to have the opportunity to contribute the titrated results of these into direct policy recommendations, and new initiatives (like the motion put forth in Trinidad & Tobago’s parliament for the protection and conservation of Trinidad’s Northern Range by Senator Anthony Vieira). This was a big deal. It was also a lot of fun getting there.
The “Offline” campaign ran over 3 years, with Climate Talks involving 5000+ students and kids. About 200 youth received a greater level of training through their participation in full-day Climate Champion training activities, and 3 in-person national consultation events (one in each country) on priority climate issues were held. A lot of people learned and had a better understanding about climate issues and the environment. Students and participants saw themselves on local TV and in the newspapers. Together, with partners in the three countries we got ideas together and created some great Climate Educational Tools and Knowledge Products so that Climate Education could become a bit more cool (pun intended). We created 8 educational videos and 100+ social media graphics, a climate champion training tool kit and fun gamified climate talks. Excitingly, the project also allowed IAMovement to begin its first dabble with formalized lessons in Behavioural Science through partnering with the pioneers in this field, the Behavioural Insights Team. They helped us better understand online and offline climate-related nudges that we’re slowly trying out as time and resources allow. Educational videos produced under the UN Democracy Fund project on various topics can all be found under the ‘Educational’ category of the IAMovement film room.
Thanks to this project the “WEClimate App” finally got developed, and although we still have a long way to go with it – it’s already shown its potential as a valuable public education and social engagement tool around climate in T&T and the Caribbean which we know will go a lot farther.
With all the fun and all the games involved in this development effort to date we also learned a lot. For one, we learned that App development is costly and isn’t a walk in the park – but the successes achieved to date and the recognition that a focused online platform could serve as a vital tool in the overall fight and mobilization of people to act on climate have positioned us well to take the next steps.
Importantly as well, this project shows a novel approach to digital climate governance in the Caribbean, unearthing three (3) main aspects and takeaways which we are proud to share. These are that:
- Civic-parliamentary working groups are important
- Social climate platforms can help educate and allow policy feedback and
- Offline policy development avenues can be a fun process and more importantly can be connected and optimized with online feedback and engagement.
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