| "After the camp, the kids were empowered, connected, and educated, which is what you want from a project involving public outreach." | |
| Tom Herder, Mobile Bay National Estuary Program |
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Climate change is expected to increase the severity of tropical storms and hurricanes. While no individual storm can be attributed to climate change, Hurricane Katrina illustrated the vulnerability of the Gulf Coast to extreme storm events, leaving many coastal residents—particularly children—feeling defenseless in the face of the changing climate.
Last summer, a group of 24 teenagers who experienced the devastation of Katrina firsthand went from powerless to empowered during a two-week Climate Change Camp in coastal Alabama, where they learned about the science, environmental impacts and responses, and policy questions resulting from climate change.
"We wanted to give them a proactive attitude about what they can do about climate and weather events in their future," says Kate Graves, former Southeast Climate Program officer for the World Wildlife Fund–U.S. (WWF) and organizer of the camp, which was part of the organization's Southeast Climate Witness Program.
While the Climate Camp was a one-time WWF event, Graves hopes that coastal resource management and other organizations will be able to take the program and reproduce it on a local level.
With funding for the camp from the Allianz Foundation for North America, Graves first developed an interdisciplinary climate change curriculum for high school classes. She worked with educators in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi to promote the program and developed criteria for selecting the students. All the participants were between the ages of 15 and 18, and had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
During the program, the teens met with researchers from the University of South Alabama at Mobile and regional and national scientists to learn about climate change issues and the coastal ecosystem. They also participated in restoration projects organized by the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program.
"My role," notes Tom Herder, science communicator for the Mobile Bay Estuary Program, "was to put them to work and involve them in some activity to remediate the effects of the storm."
Herder partnered with U.S. Fish and Wildlife staff members at Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge in southern Alabama, where half the students completed a dune-plant restoration. Two days later, the rest of the students completed a marsh-grass restoration in Mobile Bay.
Getting hands-on with the restoration projects "really gave the kids power over the circumstances of Katrina," Herder says. "They got to give back some of what the storm had taken away. After the camp, the kids were empowered, connected, and educated, which is what you want from a project involving public outreach."
"Definitely other organizations could do this program in the future," Graves says. "We did this on a large scale because we had the opportunity, but it could be done on a much smaller scale."
She adds, "There is value in keeping it local and helping kids understand what's happening with climate change in their own ecosystems."
For more information on the WWF Allianz Climate Camp, point your browser to www.worldwildlife.org/climate/curriculum/item5943.html. You may also contact Kate Graves at kgraves@islandpress.org, or Tom Herder at (251) 431-6409, or therder@mobilebaynep.com.
