"The European "Imagining Climate-Just Futures" project encourages citizens to imagine the climate-just future they want and take action to achieve it 💭🌱💜✊*"*
Imagining Climate-Just Futures is a European project developing and supporting a wide range of activities giving space to citizens to reflect on climate futures. The ambition of this initiative is to engage more than 3,400 European citizens in over 50 activities and workshops of various kinds (awareness-raising, discussions, policy training, local actions, artistic and creative propositions...) The consortium intends to achieve this goal through three main levers of change: activism, community and culture.
Among the targets of this broad project, young activists have a special place. The intent is to provide them with spaces of discussions, tools for navigating the world of policies
The Catalan branch: Rubèn Suriñach Padilla, Xarxa d'Economia Solidària de Catalunya, Ecohub
We had the chance to discuss with Rubèn Suriñach Padilla who is involved in the Imagining Climate-Just Futures project. With XES (Xarxa d'Economia Solidària), they shared their knowledge concerning the facilitation of participatory workshops to build future scenarios, notably based on the Futurs imPossibles campaign. They also organized training sessions to help their European partners build up their skills in order to confidently develop similar projects in other countries, other languages.
Out of this process, they updated one of their previous methodological guides to enable people to spontaneously use the method and allow for even broader dispersion.
"Building Participatory Future Scenarios for a Socioecological Transition Methodological guide 2024 Version"
The guide includes four participatory methods for future scenarios building:
- Scenario planning through drivers of change
- The Three Horizons model
- Appreciative gaze approach
- Chronicles of the Great Transition
Finally, Rubèn and his colleagues organized a workshop with different youth organizations in Catalonia, based on the methodology "Chronicles from the future", which proposes to write pieces of news from the future. You can find an example of a newspaper front page just below.
"We deal with more news every day related to extreme weather events, the cost-ofliving crisis and water scarcity. What was terrible speculation about the future until now has become a harsh reality. This is what we call ecological realism."
"It is particularly relevant to consider three main factors of ecological realism: the consequences of climate change, the depletion of fossil fuels and critical resources to provide renewable energy and the impact of biodiversity loss."
scientific knowledge on global level and consequences on the workshop's geographical context
different degrees of social vulnerability
practising utopian creativity to tackle dystopia
nouvelles scout movement?
"Two weeks ago, at Escola de Transicions, with this year's group of students, we were able to experience a new technique for future scenario building based on the Multi-Level Perspective, which relates three levels of change that operate in transition processes: Landscape (external factors that we do not control and can destabilize the system), Regime (that set of regulations, infrastructures, subsystems that reproduce and stabilize the system) and Niche (the radical innovations that can break into the system and change the rules of the game).
Each group had previously chosen a problem or area in which they wanted to intervene to advance the ecosocial transition, and the workshop served to define the desirable horizon and reconstruct, from the present, the relationship of the changes that must occur at the three levels to reach it."
CERV
developing tools and effective methodologies to work with young people (under 18)
imagining futures scenarios
and establish the steps to get it
what they would like, how to be involved and work on
collect tools to work with youngsters on scenario planning
and establish creative approaches to envision the steps
all the 5 countries pilot the tools over the next months
collect evidence and publish
for people other to organize workshops
deliverable is being developed → next year
"🌿✨ Happy #WorldYouthSkillsDay!
Today we celebrate young people who are building green skills and taking real action for a cleaner, healthier environment. 💚
Through creativity and collaboration, #children and youth have been learning how to turn their ideas into practical steps for positive change. From raising awareness to planning local activities, they're gaining the skills they need to protect the environment and inspire their communities. 🌱
These young changemakers remind us that when youth are supported and heard, they can lead the way toward a more sustainable, climate-just future for everyone.
This activity is part of the @imagining.futures project, financed by the European Union and implemented by Save the Children Kosova/o."