After days of endless rain and flooding all across Slovakia, the weather prognosis finally improved and our Climate Advocates headed to Zilina, a beautiful picturesque part of the country, to work up their themes for the 3rd year of Challenge Europe.

The meeting was held during the first weekend of June and was kicked off with a huge dose of adrenaline. One of this year´s Climate Advocates is also co-director of a project called Rope Preles Park situated close to Zilina. He kindly invited the group to visit this extreme outdoor sports facility comprising of cable barriers situated in the tree-tops. Overcoming the jungle obstacles located high in trees and sharing the fear experienced jumping down at the end of the course was a great bonding experience and provided the Climate Advocates with a memorable adventure.

Fresh from this experience, and still full of adrenalin, the advocates started to work on their projects.

Climate Rubicon is targeted at secondary schools students and aims to increase their interest in climate issue looking at how it is relevant to them and demonstrating how their environment could impacted. The main tool for this project will be a lively, Slovakia-centric, presentation which will involve the students themselves taking part in the form of role play. They will be encouraged to hold a debate whilst playing different characters such as climate sceptics or alarmists, to get the young people to consider various angles and different points of view. The advocate team plan to offer this as an educational tool for schools and will provide this presentation upon request. The coordinator of this particular project group is the youngest of the Slovak Climate Advocates. She is currently in her final year of secondary school and so is close in age to the target audience for this project

For primary school pupils the Climate Advocates would like to organise green story telling. The younger students, falling in 6 to 10 years category, would be encouraged to write their own fictional stories while the older group, the 10 to 14 year olds, would be required to do some research first. For example they may be asked to identify interesting trees in their surrounding environment and use these as the basis for their stories. This project will be a follow up to the Pathways to Green Towns worked out in the second year of Challenge Europe

The Slovakian champion’s third idea is to initiate a wide-spread implementation of energy efficiency certificates for buildings which would highlight energy savings or inefficiency to prospective buyers. The team intends to do this by liaising with both consumer protection institutions and estate agent’s associations to invite them to cooperate on this project.

It is likely that an online course will be established to improve knowledge about these kind of schemes to local authorities, particularly smaller ones where staff numbers are small and already overburdened. The course would, amongst other things, aim help them to make well informed decisions in terms of energy efficiency or alternative energy sources.

The Climate Advocates also considered attending various summer festivals where they could personally spread their knowledge regarding climate change and its impacts upon the environment to festival goers. Finally, the group also made the decision to continue actively promoting the projects created during previous years of Challenge Europe.