The Climate Academy is born: training and citizen action against climate change

PalmBringing together citizens, organizations, the scientific community, and the economic sector, providing training on climate change, and promoting action to address the challenges we face are the main objectives of the Climate Academy, a laboratory and platform for organizations created to overcome the gap between scientific and technical knowledge and the dissemination of everything related to climate change. The promoters of this initiative are the Estudi General Lul·lià, which will host it, and Palma XXI. Participating organizations include Friends of the Earth, Mallorca Preservation, Marilles, Plan XXI, the College of Environmentalists, the Mediterranean Initiatives Foundation, and Tramuntana XXI. The Academy also has the support of Caixa Colonya.

"It's about responding to the concerns generated by climate change and promoting action, in addition to uniting organizations that are already part of the Estudi General," said the institution's director, Sílvia Ventayol. For his part, Jaume Garau, Vice President of Palma XXI, noted that the Academy's inspiration is "the Paris City Hall Académie du Climat," which has been operating for five years. "Organizations that want to present experiences and projects have a place to meet. It's an academy in the Platonic sense, of everyone and for everyone," he continued.

The Academy has created a provisional program of activities with lectures on climate shelters in schools, the case of Paris as an example of experimentation and participation in architecture, urban gardens and community action, and eco-anxiety, among other topics. It has also organized workshops (on bicycle repair and preserved foods, for example) and screenings, such as the Conscious Cinema series that Mallorca Preservation will offer in collaboration with the Evolution Film Festival. In addition, future initiatives such as the climate solutions laboratory will be launched, which will provide technological and social proposals to address environmental challenges with idea labs and prototypes.

"We're not competing with the realm of academic discourse, which we share. We want to reach the realm of citizen discourse," Garau emphasized, adding that it was necessary to fill this space and "create broad and sensitive citizen knowledge of the topic." "We want a positive perspective: to raise problems, but also solutions. It's about making society feel like a protagonist in this transformation," he added.