EduFire Toolkit was an educational project coordinated by the Pau Costa Foundation, within the framework of the European Commision’s Erasmus+ programme.
Currently, all climate change forecasts predict an increase in drought and average temperatures across Europe with a consequent expansion of the fire season, promoting changes in vegetation, loss of biodiversity, decreasing the quality of environmental services and contributing to global warming. The climate is changing more in northern Europe than in other parts of the world, so these countries must urgently take measures to mitigate the impacts and adapt. Similarly, regional climate change models also highlight the importance of developing new forest fire prevention strategies in the Mediterranean, which is considered a high-risk area. According to the recent publications of the European Commission regarding wildfires, investing in fire prevention will be prioritised. Education and raising risk awareness amongst future generations has a central role in the sustainability of fire prevention.
EduFire Toolkit developed a set of multidisciplinary teaching and learning resources following a Project-Based Learning methodology, together with activities designed to encourage community engagement, aimed at secondary school teachers and students (12-16 years old). All this contextualised in real and local challenges related to climate change and wildfire risk reduction. The project takes a transversal approach with concepts around fire, wildfires and climate change, and engages with the syllabus of different disciplines (STEAM). Thus, it demonstrates how they are related to each other while promoting participation, structuring the materials in different levels of concretion according to the level, rhythm and educational needs, taking into account diversity.
The Project-Based Learning methodology allows students to acquire knowledge and key skills through developing projects that respond to real-life problems. All the resources and results of the project are open access (see here), useful as tools to complement the teaching and learning process, and help the educational community to address the problem of climate change, and particularly in relation to highly relevant wildfires.
