11 Year Old Writes Open Letter to 650 British MPs to Ask for a Climate Change Teacher in Every School
This afternoon, Tuesday the 23rd April, Greta Thunberg will speak at a special meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change at 2pm, in the Attlee Suite, Portcullis House and all MPs are invited to attend. I wonder how many of you will bother to turn up?
I do not want to declare a Climate Emergency, that ship has already sailed and now even the deniers are in agreement, after Sir David Attenborough spelled it out clearly to all humanity in his most recent hard hitting documentary on BBC1, that we have less than a decade to mitigate the greenhouse gasses that are heating up our planet at a rate that is well beyond all the legal agreements our governments have signed up to in both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.
No, I want to talk about a Climate Change Teacher in Every School! A joint partnership, set up between a UK based education company, Harwood Education and the One UN Climate Change Learning Partnership (UNITAR; UN CC:Learn) has created an innovative solution that will ensure every child receives the very best climate change learning that the UN has created. They have launched the Climate Change Teacher Course on World Earth Day in the United Kingdom. This trial launch has been sponsored by YPO, they need at least 80 Teachers to sign-up and do the easy audio/visual online course that, when completed, will leave those teachers accredited as the very first Climate Change Teachers in the World, and these teachers will be at the forefront of delivering climate change literacy to all the pupils that attend the schools they teach in.
While global attention has been directed to various climate campaigns, this new Climate Change Teachers Course and its accompanying UN:eduCCate Programme are pioneering Climate Literacy here in the UK first, before they scale up to every school worldwide.
I would also ask you, as an MP of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second's Government, if you would be interested in taking part in this groundbreaking trial of the Climate Change Teacher Course, that is fully accredited by the One UN Climate Learn Partnership, yourself? Surely every MP should know all the facts about Climate Change: The Legal Framework, Climate Change and Cities, Climate Change and Health, Climate Change and Gender, Climate Change and Science, all the scientific facts on GHGs (Greenhouse Gasses for those MPs that don't yet know this) and SDG's (our Government signed the United Kingdom up to the Sustainable Development Goals but most of us are unaware of the fact that we have not achieved nearly any of the goals they signed our country up to!).
Today, Tuesday 23 April, MPs will have the opportunity to hear Greta Thunberg speak at a special meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change at 2pm, in the Attlee Suite, Portcullis House. As an MP I am asking you to please listen. More than 1.5 million children and young people worldwide attended the school strikes for climate in March - a global movement which started with just one child, Greta Thunberg.
Young people, including myself, across the UK continue monthly strikes, demanding action on climate change, But I want to go one step further and I want to demand that we have one Climate Change Teacher in Every School!
We desperately need Climate Change Teachers qualified to deliver the UN:educcate Programme, which delivers more than 500 lessons, all based on the current school curriculum but with Climate Change Literacy at their core in every class-room.
We know that our youth will enter the work force which will need them to be climate change literate and able to strive through social innovation.
Not just for future generations but for those in countries such as Mozambique, already suffering the impacts of climate change today.
They tell us that much more needs to be done and much faster.
Don’t we all agree we have an urgency and it is our responsibility to listen and act?
More information is available here: https://www.unccteacheracademy.com
I would be very grateful if you could let me know if you will be participating.
This is an opportunity for all teachers, teaching assistants, absolutely anybody working in a school in this country and educating our youth, to become climate change literate, confident to share climate change best practices. We must ensure that these specialist teachers join a global network of 200,000 scientists, policy makers, researchers and practitioners from 190+ countries that have acquired the same essentials and therefore understand more of how and why climate change is happening, as well as the mitigation and adaptation we need to deliver to halt the rise in temperature immediately. We need a Climate Change Teacher in Every School so that they can go on to share their newly acquired knowledge with all students now that we are at one of the most critical points in our species' existence because we all know that this is a Climate Emergency and we want action not words but real, tangible, useful action and we want it now.
I look forward to meeting you all at the All Parliamentary Group on Climate Change Event today, to discuss the above with you, in person.
Hannah-Jane Kenton
11 Years Old, Year 7A, Hitchin Girls School, Hertfordshire
www.unccteacheracademy.com