Swansea Depths

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Swansea Depths
by \| 26-12-2012 23:50 0
An initiative by -Swansea Depth, Australia:- - Article by Madhav Datt Part of my series highlighting youth initiatives for motivation of youth like you and me to start actual grassroots initiatives for positive environmental change. Contact Green the Gene - to join up and help us in our mission. Or bring a few like minded friends of yours to join up and start up any such activity. For any help - let us know. Our goal is to educate the younger community on sea-level rise. We?ve had meetings with our local council and with the local Men?s group which ensured their support for our project. Students from Swansea High and the Men?s Group constructed a scale model of the Swansea area (trailer-size) and the equivalent water of various sea-level rises is pumped into the model, and accurately depicts the inundation consequences. This model is essential to our project. We?ve successfully completed one workshop with fifty primary school students in attendance. Students who participated in our workshop have a better understanding of sea-level rise. Our team plan is to tackle an issue that has arisen in our community and indeed the world, over a number of years. Living on the edge of the largest permanent salt water lake in the Southern Hemisphere has brought us face to face with the growing problem of sea level rise, flooding, inundation and the threat to ecosystems. Our mission is to inform and educate the local community about the years ahead, especially the younger generation with an educational plan which is enjoyable but also informative. We have been working on this project since October 2011.The primary !--object--ive of this project has been to raise awareness of the impending threat that sea level rise has in our local area. Swansea and surrounds have been identified as a major threat area in Australia for inundation if sea level rise continues. To create greater awareness we effectively planned and ran an interactive workshop in June 2012 with primary school students. We wanted to make primary school students more conscious of the risks and problems arising in our local area. They are, after all, the next group of thinkers, doers and community members to follow in our footsteps. We want to encourage interest and understanding of the predicament at hand, and we believe that we have done so with the workshop. We plan to run more of these programs in our local community not only for primary school children but also for older community members too. We will continue with these workshops through the development of a training package that will enable succession planning and sustainability of the program. We have seen positive results from the workshop we organised in June 2012. Five local schools attended the event and all of the schools felt that the event was both enjoyable and highly thought provoking. We taught the students about sea level rise and the concept of Global Warming. We have measured our impact by the amount of support the local council is giving our project and also by the enthusiasm of the primary school Principals to include this program as an integral part of the formal transition to High School Program. We continue to receive support from the local council, local school groups and The Swansea Men?s Group, in addition to continual support from our school and members of our school community. With such support from local groups the project has been able to educate a large number of primary school aged children and an increased level of awareness has been seen in this group. We conducted a sample survey of understanding sea-level rise amongst children who attended and children who did not attend our workshop.

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