Climate workshop in Milltown
On Thursday 9 March, the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice ran a climate workshop for people who work in the Jesuit Curia offices in Milltown Park. Drs Ciara Murphy (Environmental Policy Advocate) and Kevin Hargaden (Director and Social Theologian) led the process.
The workshop is a tool of Climate Fresk », an NGO which was founded by French engineer and energy transition consultant Cédric Ringenbach in 2018. Its goal is to raise public awareness about climate change through a collaborative serious game based on 42 cards where the participants draw a Fresk which summarizes the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. The idea is to help participants to learn about the science behind climate change and to encourage them to make small changes to help the environment.
The workshop in Milltown started at 9.30am. There were two groups of participants in the spacious Arrupe Room, with Ciara facilitating one and Kevin the other. To start, each member of a group was given a card that represented an aspect of the climate change process (such as CO2 emissions, melting sea ice, rising temperatures, carbon sinks, and climate refugees), and they had to work collaboratively to arrange them in the order of cause to effect. After a number of rounds of cards, a large collage representing the complex cause-effect web that is the climate crisis emerges, and with the help of the facilitators the participants gain a deeper and more coherent picture of the knock-on effects of human activities.
The final part of the workshop had all the participants identifying changes that can and ought to be made so as to alleviate the crisis. All of the ideas they came up with were mapped onto a chart in accordance with their ease of implementation and their efficacy. The Milltown participants were very impressed and pleased with the workshop, many of them acknowledging that they had never understood before just how all the separate pieces of the climate change puzzle fitted together.
The Milltown workshop was just one of a series that Ciara and Kevin will be facilitating in the next few weeks. To find out more about upcoming workshops, please get in touch at [email protected]
