Solution description

Teal Education aims to educate adults about the causes and effects of climate change, as well as ways to get involved through climate action.

The tool will allow learners to enhance their climate change literacy through graphs and data, while relating the climate crisis to local and international contexts. The facts and the science will be complemented by powerful photos, stories and case studies in order to generate a strong emotional response from the user.

After learning about climate change, we want to ensure the user does not feel hopeless about the situation and prompt them to take action straight away through individual and community projects. For the individual, there will be a quiz the user can take to pinpoint where they should be making changes in their everyday lives and links for contacting local government to ensure their voice can be heard by people in power. For the community side of things, there will be links to social media groups for discussing their ideas and organizing action locally.​

To encourage climate action and give ideas, we will also include case studies of how people and communities have made changes to create significant positive change on the environment. They can view case studies from around the world using the teal tool map​.

Solution context

Climate change literacy is crucial for action towards climate justice, since it allows individuals to understand our influence on the climate, and climate's influence on us and our society. ​Nevertheless, considerable gaps of access and inequalities exist in climate change literacy between regions and age groups. 

Our aim is to not only improve global climate change literacy, but to inspire people to take personal responsibility for their impact on the environment and be part of the solution.​

Solution target group

Our tool is not restricted to a single target group, as the content can easily be accessed by multiple audiences.​ For simplicity, the initial version will be tailored towards adults from english speaking countries, and will be marketed in particular towards people and communities who currently have a lack of understanding of climate change. 

However, our aim for the tool is for it to be accessible for people of all ages, all over the world.​ We will do this through additional languages​, as well as a dedicated section for children​.

Solution impact

The two impacts we aim to have are:

1. Education of climate change​
2. Mobilising climate action

We plan to measure the success of the education side of the tool through a pop-up questionnaire. This will consist of a series of questions asking users to rank their knowledge of climate change from 1 to 10​. This will appear when a user enters the site to determine their initial climate change literacy, and then the same questionnaire will reappear once the user has finished using the tool. An improvement in this score will then be used to gauge the extent of which each user has learnt.

In terms of measuring climate action, we will use #TealEducation to keep us updated with any action that has come about in response to using the tool​. Furthermore, the tool will have an integrated to-do/checklist, which will provide users with a list of climate actions that they can do today. This checklist will have a feature allowing users to tick off the actions that they have done, which will provide us with another measure of how successfully we have generated positive change.

Solution tweet text

Teal Education aims to mobilise climate action by enhancing climate literacy. The tool will educate adults about the causes & effects of climate change through a combination of data & case studies, as well as also suggesting ways to get involved through climate action.

Solution innovativeness

We think it is important to compliment the facts and the science with powerful photos, stories and case studies in order to generate a stronger emotional response and stonger engagement from the user.

Our tool will provide this unique combination of graphs and data which then relates the climate crisis to a local and international context through these engaging stories. 

Furthermore, after learning about the causes and effects of climate change, our platform will then encourage to take action straight away through individual and community projects.

We believe that this complete journey from the education of the problem through to the mobilisation of the solution will be a valuable and innovative addition to the climate change education space.

Solution transferability

We believe there is plenty of scope to roll out our tool to a wider range of audiences. As mentioned above, our aim is for the tool to be accessible for people of all ages, all over the world.​

One way we can achieve this is through additional languages,​ as our initial launch will only be in English.

Another ambition that we have is to create a dedicated section for children. This will be less data heavy and less focused on the hard-hitting stories & case studies, and more focused on providing children with both the foundational knowledge of climate change, as well as inpirational stories of positive climate action, in order to inspire the next generation.​

Finally, we also believe there is potential to launch a version of the site for businesses & organisations​. The climate actions in the initial launch will be focused on how individuals and communities can make changes to benefit the climate, however we believe there is demand for a version of this tool dedicated to businesses, so that they too can be inspired to take action.

Solution sustainability

There are several ways that we plan to initially market the Teal Education tool.

For example, after completion of the tool, users can earn a badge/certificate which they users will be able to add to their LinkedIn profiles​. We will also have links embedded into all the content within the tool that will allow users to share anything that has inspired them onto social media. We are also hoping to inpsire a wave of climate action that will be shared on social media through #TealEducation. All of the aforementioned will help which will generate conversation on social media platforms about Teal Education and therefore will promote the tool organically​.

Furthermore, we will also collaborate with businesses so that they can use this tool to educate their workforce. We believe that businesses will be able to use our tool as a strong CSR tool​, such as being able to claim that "100% of our workforce have gained the Teal Education Climate Change Literacy certificate", for example.

We will also collaborate with local governments to accelerate this roll out​, in order to mobilise local communities to generate large scale climate action.

In terms of long term ambitions, we will aim to roll-out the points raised in the Transferability section above. Most notably, this includes versions of the site in additional languages as well as a version dedicated to children.

Solution team work

We worked really well as a team, with each member everybody playing a significant part in the project. We all brought a unique skillset to the group, and this blend of skills really complimented each other so that we could generate a strong idea.

From our organisers at WEMC:

The diverse team of 7 hackers worked very well during the pressure filled 1.5 days. They maintained clear lines of communication with each other and mentors to share ideas, points of view, information, and expertise. They clearly understood each other’s abilities and skills thus maintaining a productive and engaging work atmosphere for the hackathon.