Almost 100 new Climate Justice Ambassadors for Taipei

GIGABYTE, cooperating with Plant-for-the-Planet Foundation, launched the “Make Earth Green Again” program in 2017 and committed to planting 75,000 trees and holding 5 Plant-for-the-Planet Academies in 3 years. Time flies. GIGABYTE has successfully completed 4 Academies, and the 5th Academy was held on October 19, 2019.

The National Chengchi University (NCCU) is the co-organizer of the 5th Academy. The activities took place in the building of the Commercial College of NCCU. 32 students from NCCU registered as volunteers for this Academy. Among them, 20 students served as co-moderators to assist in teaching activities. 12 students helped with administrative affairs such as photographing.

A total of 84 children attended on the day of the Academy. These children came from 29 elementary schools in Taipei City, New Taipei City, Keelung City, Taoyuan City, and Hsinchu City.

National Chengchi University (NCCU) is also an essential partner of Plant-for-the-Planet Academy in Taiwan. Again, the College of Commerce of NCCU provided its international hall and classrooms for GIGABYTE to carry out the event. The venue was so well-equipped and enabled the teaching activities to be proceeded smoothly and successfully.

Last but not least, special thanks go to Plant-for-the-Planet Team members Adelya Salakhutdinova, Karim Kaamel, Marina Edelmann and Anne Koch for guiding and supporting the implementation of Academy in Taiwan, and on top of that, to Ni Ni and Li-Shan Huang for moderating the Academy together.

After the welcome address, the full attention of the children turned to a presentation "Now We Children Save the World!" given by two 10-year-old Climate Justice Ambassadors. Hsiang-Yun was selected as one of the presenters of the final presentation at the previous Academy on 20th April 2019. After her speech, moderators Ni Ni and Li-Shan raised several questions for the children under the stage to see if their speech was clear and understandable, and asked them to provide several ideas that were doable for them and could help to make the environment better. The children mentioned planting trees, rejecting the use of disposable tableware, carrying out resource recycling, and participating in beach cleanup activities.

All children were divided into 10 groups, 8-9 children per group, in the following group activities of the day. Each group was led by 2 co-moderators, who have taken a 3-hour preliminary training course led by moderator Yi-Fen two weeks prior to the Academy.

Following the procedure of Plant-for-the-Planet Academy, the first group activity was the World Game. With the lead by co-moderators, children learned about the uneven distribution of population, wealth and CO2 emissions in the world by distributing different tokens on a map. Bottle caps symbolized population because it is one of the most common types of human-made waste. Milk caramels always bring happiness to children. Therefore, it symbolized wealth due to people always think that the richer, the happier. Chocolates symbolized carbon emissions as they are made from Cocoa trees, one of cash crops that directly lead to man-made massive deforestation. From the game, children understood how population, wealth and CO2 emissions actually distribute worldwide, and the inequity that most of the carbon emissions are generated by the rich.

After that the Rhetoric Training was to train children how to speak and persuade others to know the importance of planting trees. Co-moderators first introduced why the skill to give a speech is so important. Afterwards, the children shared their opinions on the elements of a good speech and what disadvantages an unskillful speaker would have.

Then each child received a card with an image on the one side and a text explaining the image on another side. After reading the text to understand the meaning of the image, each child presented to other children in the group one by one. Co-moderators and other children gave feedback to his/her performance in order to improve his/her skill in a presentation next time.

After lunch and a brief break, children moved to back the area behind the NCCU Library. The children’s mission was to plant 10 tea trees. Mr. Rolance CHU taught children how to plant a tree step by step. The children were then responsible for digging the soil, planting the saplings, filling soil, and watering.

After the tree planting, the Academy proceeded to World Café and Work in School Group. In the first round, children worked in groups to firstly brainstorm on how to motivate parents, teachers, other children, media and politicians to join a climate initiative. They also discussed how to organize a tree planting event. In the second round, children regrouped by their schools, so that they could draw up an action plan with peers from the same school. Their plans included the goal of action, how to organize, where to find resources, the schedule of implementation, as well as what outcome they expected. They wrote their plans on paper posters, so that they could present the poster to adults at the final presentation.

At the same time, the 10 children picked from Rhetoric Training in the morning moved to a separate classroom. They practiced giving the Climate Justice Ambassador Speech at the evening presentation. Some children had strong personal opinions on how to deliver his speech.

All children and adults gathered again at the international meeting hall again for the exciting Evening Presentation. Finally the spotlight turned to the 10 presenters that gave the speech “Now We Children Save the World!" in relays. The speech received positive response from the audience.

After the presentation, the rest of the children came onto the stage to present their action plans. A group of children particularly mentioned that they will ask their school president for donations in order to hold a tree-planting event.

At the end of the one-day Academy. 84 children received Climate Justice Ambassador certificates from Mr. Rolance CHU, Senior Director of Sustainable Development Office of GIGABYTE. Each of them also received the book “Tree-by-Tree”, which would tell them more stories about the Plant-for-the-Planet and the Stop Talking Start Planting Project.

We would like to thank all those who have long supported and involved in this wonderful Academy. Your support and encouragement are all crucial to the promotion of climate education in Taiwan.

All photos taken at the Academy can be downloaded here.

The Academy inspired you to take on climate action? Become a Climate Justice Ambassador yourself through registering for one of our upcoming Academies here.