Meio Ambiente

On Wednesday and Thursday, September 23 and 24, a workshop "Environmental Education in the context of Climate Change" will be held in Brasilia. The purpose of this event is to discuss the basic assumptions for the development of guidelines and strategies for environmental education to be incorporated into the National Plan on Climate Change.

The workshop is being hosted by the Ministry of Environment, through the Secretariat of Institutional and Environmental Citizenship (SAIC) and its Department of Environmental Education (DEA), with support from the Brazilian Forum of NGOs (FBOMS), the Social Movements Environment and Development and civil society.

The debate will gather representatives from government, educational and productive sectors, civil society organizations, religious traditions and traditional populations. During the event, participants will prioritize content and approaches to communication actions and formal education (including vocational and continuing education) and non-formal, priorities, targets and indicator processes and outcomes for each theme.

According to Claudison Rodrigues, director of the DEA, global warming, climate change and environmental impacts of these processes are issues that should be widely discussed. Rodrigues explains that environmental education is a powerful tool for the transformation of values, attitudes and consumption patterns, in search of a more sustainable society.

The National Plan on Climate Change was established under the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Climate Change, and received contributions from the National Conference on the Environment and the Brazilian Forum on Climate Change. It was open for public consultation via the Internet on October 1, 2008 and was published in December of that year.

The plan aims to encourage the development and enhancement actions for mitigation and adaptation in Brazil, working with the global effort to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and to create internal conditions for dealing with the impacts of global climate change.