Fall 2017 Global U-Grad and PUAN alumna Haram Fatima is a climate change activist, currently pursuing her MPhil in epidemiology and public health at the University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Lahore. She is passionate about bringing fourth positive change in behaviors through educating the masses in her own capacity, as education is an essential element of the global response to climate change.
For her community development project, Haram conducted an educative workshop titled ‘Changing Earth Through Changing Minds’, an initiative taken to create awareness and civic responsibility on climate change. The event was executed with the help of Global U-Grad Spring 2015 and PUAN alumna Dr. Samia Farooq, who mentored the informative sessions and activities.
“We must address the impact of global warming by increasing climate literacy and encourage changes in attitudes and behaviors to help everyone adapt to climate change-related trends”.
She explained how education and awareness enables informed decision-making while playing an essential role in increasing adaptation and mitigation capacities in local communities.
“It also empowers men and women to adopt sustainable lifestyles”.
With this vision, Haram with the help of her team raised their voices to make and implement effective public policies and empirical research in academia for climate action. Together, they reached out to individuals from diverse backgrounds through recurrent episodes of awareness sessions in order to instill societal responsibility – to create a sustainable environment. Her teammates include PUAN members Hafsah Naeem (Global U-Grad, Spring 2017), Muhammad Ans Afzal (Global U-Grad, Fall 2018), (late) Aiman Mehboob (Global U-Grad, Spring 2015) and Syed Muhammad Faheem Ahmad (Seeds of Peace, 2006).
The project primarily focused on training university students as a climate champion for the dissemination of messages, school outreach, and awareness sessions. This included:
Teacher Training Program:
To build climate change literacy by empowering teachers and students to better understand the issues and to become part of the solution. It helped teachers understand the dynamics and impacts of climate change through a holistic approach. Teachers developed future oriented capacities in facilitating climate change mitigation. It served as a ripple effect in reaching out to a larger set of communities, where each instructor took it upon them to teach these practices in their local schools. A total of 35 teachers were nominated by their schools to attend this training.
“Through this, we were able to create an impact on more than 2000+ students. We also developed a curriculum in the form of a comic book and shared more than 400 reusable bags and seed pouches”.
Women Retreat:
An Eco-Talk session called ‘Women in Climate Change’ was held. This all women meetup invited industry leading eco-bloggers, ecopreneurs and eco-social activists. The retreat embraced diversity and brought together women from all fields of climate change, to acknowledge their individual efforts, highlight key issues and establish linkages to work together as a team to combat climate crisis.
This led to the creation of a sustainable project, where participants designed a school curriculum for climate literacy in collaboration with Sapphire and conducted more awareness workshops at Popcorn Studio. A diverse group of 30 women joined in including Asma Farhad (President, Go-Green Welfare Society) and Nusrat Shaheen (Rep, UNDP).
“We promoted the message that climate change is everyone’s business and is apart from societal gender roles. We were able to share our platform with women who strive together to create a sustainable earth in their own capacities”.
Climate Change Resilience and Mitigation Techniques Workshops:
To instill the concepts of mitigation and explore the link between climate change, agriculture, and livestock a one-day hands-on training for veterinary students, researchers and people with industrial and farming background, titled ‘Climate Change Resilience, Regenerative Livestock Farming and Climate Smart Agriculture’ was conducted. The University students completed all training and worked to help farmers to enhance soil microflora and convert dirt into soil. This training covered a focused group of 100 direct beneficiaries. This workshop was featured in The Daily Times: https://dailytimes.com.pk/566518/correlation-between-climate-change-food-security-highlights/.
Climate Change Talks:
To highlight the cardinal impact of climate change on the industry, an interview series with stakeholders was conducted under the heading ‘Climate Change Talks’. These talks will be a primer on the greatest global issue of our times. The talks feature many well-known climate change activists of the region. So far, the team has recorded interviews with Rafay Alam (Pakistani environmental lawyer and activist), Humaira Iqbal (Animal Nutritionist, Climate Change Researcher), Mr. Shahid Rashid Awan (additional Secretary (Tech) of Forest, Wildlife & Fisheries Department of Punjab) and Dr. Muhammad Usman Zaheer (National Consultant, FAO).
This segment will help the greater audience understand the impact of climate change and aims to establish a close liaison with academia as well, so that the gap between academia and industries can be bridged effectively as a mitigation strategy.
“Holding interviews of influential people will help in the dissemination of knowledge among general public at a larger scale”.
We applaud Haram and her teams individual and joint efforts for creating a safer, healthier and educated Pakistani society in climate change. Sharing her sentiments, she expressed with gratitude:
“Thank you for getting in touch and believing in what our team is doing through this platform, provided by the U.S. State Department, Global UGRAD Program, IREX and PUAN”.
Visit their Facebook page to learn more about their Community Development Initiative: https://www.facebook.com/CHANGINGEARTHTHROUGHCHANGINGMINDS/
