As part of her week of work experience at Keep Scotland Beautiful, Ruby Fisher became the youngest person to complete our Climate Emergency Training. She has detailed her experience of the course, our first in-person session for three years, below.
One of the many amazing programmes Keep Scotland Beautiful offers is a fantastic course on the climate emergency. This course covers net zero goals, greenhouse gases and many other crucial elements of what we know as climate change. One aspect of Keep Scotland Beautiful’s net zero ambition is to encourage all staff to become carbon literate and they have recently become the first organisation in Scotland to achieve Platinum status as a Carbon Literate Organisation from the Carbon Literacy Project, a huge milestone for making Scotland as a whole carbon literate too.
I took part in this course in September, the first in-person training in three years and throughout the day I learned so much more about the climate crisis.
The course included seven hours of learning with interactive activities and was interesting and engaging, not once did it feel slow or boring, the time went by super quickly and it felt like only an hour had gone by. The course was led by Lana Murdochy and Colin Hegarty, who did a great job delivering the course in a fascinating and enjoyable way. The course took place in the KSB hub in Stirling, a welcoming environment in a great space, and didn’t so much feel like a lesson in a classroom but more like a conversation, which really helped me to absorb the information and understand what was being said.
The course went over the difference between weather and climate, but also how one can affect the other. Climate change can drastically affect weather patterns and cause what is known as ‘extreme weather’ or natural disasters such as flooding or forest fires. We also covered the net zero concept and how the goal for Scotland is to reach this goal by 2045, by not cutting greenhouse gases completely but rather balancing it with what we take by what we give out in carbon emissions.
We also talked about different perspectives towards climate change, and how different views may not reach people in the same way, and completed an activity on deciding whether a message would or wouldn’t be effective on reaching a person about climate change based on their views. The course also covered tipping points, science behind the greenhouse effect and where the most of greenhouse gases come from.
The final part of the course was an assignment to be done from home, to showcase your understanding of the topics covered in the day, and then a further three questions to be completed in the following week.
Overall, the course was a great experience. It was engaging, interactive, enjoyable and well-presented and the opportunity was one I was glad not to miss out on.
We offer a wide range of courses to help people of all ages understand the climate emergency, from our Climate Ready Classrooms for high schools and primary schools to our accredited Climate Emergency Training and shorter Introductory Training courses.
