The Climate Fresk is a French association and a workshop created by the French lecturer Cédric Rigenbach that aims to share knowledge about climate change with the general public. All the information and graphs of the game cards come from IPCC reports. The IPCC is a United Nations body responsible for assessing the science related to climate change and for informing policymakers.
The workshop starts with cards distributed in 5 sets, each card having cause and effect relationships with the other ones. Participants read the indications behind cards and place them on a big white paper, then draw arrows between cards. My role, as the facilitator, is to guide them or to clarify some points if needed. At the end, everyone has a global view of the causes, consequences and physical sciences involved in climate change. After the cards placement comes a debrief where participants express their emotions. Additional information is provided by the animator to show participants a little bit of local context regarding what has just been learned. I like to show the average carbon footprint in Germany, separated by sectors of emissions: transportation, building usage, eating, buying and public spending. I think it helps people to know where important efforts need to be done. That may inspire participants to take action.
This was my first Climate Fresk as a facilitator. Most of participants were involved in Student For Future, an association of people claiming for climate justice. Thus, a large part of them were already aware of climate issues, and they were already knowing most of the items of the Fresk. Nevertheless, they said that it was still very interesting to see all the elements of the Fresk in one piece, to have a global view of all the ins and outs of the problem. When we tried to find solutions, as people were mainly climate activists, they were already knowing all the important things to do to lower their impact on climate: avoid taking plane, reduce their usage of car, reduce their consumption of meat.
The main reason I am organising Climate Fresk workshops is because I think that the only way to save the planet is to do it together. If only a minority of people is aware of all issues related to climate change, only this minority will be ready to take action to change things. The other ones will notice their action but will not join them. The more people are informed about climate change, the easier the society changes. This workshop was very interesting to animate but I cannot wait for organising another one with people who are not already climate experts.
Once you participated to a Climate Fresk workshop, you can become facilitator after online or face-to-face training. The objective of the Climate Fresk association is to spread the knowledge up to one million people having done the workshop. Currently, 680,000 people attended the workshop. Let's go to work!
For further information: https://climatefresk.org/
Contact: