39 Climate Advocates from 11 European countries gathered in Prague recently to discuss and exchange their innovative ideas on low carbon solutions. The international training and networking event took place from 22nd until 26th of October 2010 and was funded by the European Union Youth in Action Programme.

The three-day event was content intensive and covered many topics. It started off by considering how people take up the challenge of sustainability and what it takes to encourage sustainable behaviour. They thought about people’s behaviour, how they could get them adjust this behaviour to a more living sustainable way of living and whether that would mean having to go back to the dark ages.

After that intensive discussion they moved to another subject, which focused on measuring, monitoring and evaluation. The key question advocates tried to answer was “How do we know our environmental projects are working? Chris Large and Scott Davidson, from the Global Action Plan (UK NGO), facilitated the training which included group activities, debates and games. ‘It was great! Chris and Scott really helped us a lot with our projects’ said Katarina Klingova, a Slovak Climate Advocate, after the training sessions.

On Sunday, a panel of experts listened to Advocates project plans, focusing especially on the project’s aims and challenges offering them comprehensive feedback. Experts on the panel included Michal Broža, Director of the United Nations Information Centre, Jan Dusík, former Minister of Environment, Kateřina Husová, CSR specialist from Vodafone Czech Republic and Vojtěch Kotecký, Programme Director of the Friends of the Earth.

Finally, the Advocates visited a selected ‘real-world’ working environments to see how different institutions engage and communicate on environmental issues, and how they measure progress. In small groups they visited the Climate Change department of the Ministry of Environment, the British Embassy in Prague, the office of the Czech Green political party and the Climate Change department at the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute.

Representatives from those organisations were posed questions such us “What are your biggest challenges or barriers in engaging with your audience?”, “what have been your biggest successes and failures over the last three years?” , “How do you know if your organisation is progressing well towards its aims?” and “What can you measure and how important is measurement to your organisation?”

The whole three-day event was full of laughter and energetic discussions among participants. During the Golem’s Challenge, an exploratory City Game ending in a secret bar in the centre of Prague, the Advocates also had an opportunity to investigate a little bit of the city.