First Academy in Western Nepal takes place in Rampur, Palpa

Altogether 87 children from 8 schools registered for the Academy in Rampur, Palpa and showed up in the morning to register. After a brief welcome and an ice breaking session, the full attention of the children turned to the presentation "Now we save children the world!", which was given by Climate Justice Ambassadors; Sudeep Ghimire and Kushal Ghimire. The presentation covered the most important topics related to global warming: sources of CO2, global warming, photosynthesis, the climate crisis, Plant-for-the-Planet and global justice. These topics were presented in a way suitable for children. In the subsequent question and answer session, the children had the opportunity to eliminate any ambiguities they may still have had.

Following the presentation, the participants learnt how to give presentations themselves. The children received basic public speaking tips. Afterwards the students were given some slides from the opening presentation which they had seen at the start of the day and they tried to present it to the friends. They gave each other tips on how to improve their presentations in the future and had a lot fun practicing.

The children then headed to have lunch, where they were able to relax a little and discuss the topics covered so far with each other.  

After networking during the lunch break, the children were divided into three groups to learn about global distribution and justice in the so called World Game. The children distributed playing figures, candy and balloons on the world maps laid out on the tables as symbols of the world’s population, wealth and CO2 emissions respectively. The children didn’t need to be told twice to distribute the balloons and sweets among the playing figures. Eventually, the CO2 emissions and wealth were distributed fairly – everyone has equal rights.  

For their final module, the participants were divided into school groups and got to work on solutions to stop global warming. The ideas and solutions were presented in a clear manner: "What we want to do at our school; who is responsible for which task and by when do we want to achieve our goals".  Therefore every school group made their action plan to carry out with their pupils. After that, each school presented their action plans in front of the participants

After a long, eventful, and enjoyable day, all 87 participants received their certificates, which recognized them as a Climate Justice Ambassador.  An interesting day had come to an end. Apart from the experience and newly found knowledge, all new Ambassadors took with them a Certificate, and of course the Plant-for-the-Planet T-shirt they collected at the start of the day. And the teacher representative from the school was provided with Tree by Tree book. Teachers, Friends, organizers and guests were very impressed by the performance of the children.    

With the excitement of being Climate Justice Ambassador and feeling energized, the children relocated to the schoolyard to plant their own trees! Before the planting commenced, the children listened intently to the advice of the teacher. He explained how and when to plant trees, and also showed the children how to take care for them, so the trees will grow big and strong, and thereby absorb as much CO2 as possible. In total they planted 100 trees. The other participating schools were eager to plant trees in their schools as well.

The Plant-for-the-Planet team would like to thank all those involved for this wonderful Academy. Also our gratitude goes to Rampur Municipality Forest Office, Rampur and representative from Rampur Resource Centre for accepting our invitation. Thank you Radio Rampur, Glocal Khabar for the media coverage.

More photos are available on our flickr album.