Climate Fresk - Playing with Climate Change

Effective communication about climate change to ‘the general public’, i.e. those outside the green environmental tent, is a familiar and knotty problem. Climate Fresk tries to address this through the medium of a ‘collaborative game’.

Within the CA-WN ranks we have a trained Climate Fresk facilitator, Maria Lee. Maria recently ran the first Climate Fresk workshop in Northampton for five fortunate participants including me. Superficially, the object of the game is to arrange and connect cards representing different aspects of climate change.

At a deeper level, the purpose is for people to engage with and learn about the topics on the cards, and to have a discussion with their fellow players about what goes where and why. Hey presto, a conversation about climate change!

As always, to have the conversation you first have to be in the room and we all know that some sections of the population wouldn’t be there by choice. However, for the ‘climate-curious’ this is a good and non-confrontational way to get into the subject, and Climate Fresk is used by a number of organisations and companies where it can reach a more diverse audience.

I thoroughly enjoyed the workshop and having a debate with people I didn’t know who had some different views to mine.

Maria has two more workshops planned: Saturday 2 December and Saturday 27 January. If you'd like to find out more please email or comment below.

You can read more about Maria and what she has done in response to the climate crisis in this month's 'My Three Things' feature.