 My name is Mark McCaffrey, and I formally worked at the University of Colorado in Boulder and then at the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, and now I am a freelance consultant working out of Kisbagyon, Hungary. So we interviewed you almost exactly one year ago in San Francisco, and now we're here in Paris in 2015. Last year you were telling us a bit about denial in classrooms and you were telling us about science education. Now that we're looking at climate solutions, can you tell us a bit about your work relating to that? Work that I was doing when I was at the National Center for Science Education is still moving forward. We're about to publish a paper in Science Magazine, and it looked at whether and how science teachers in the U.S. are teaching about climate change, and what we found was that, yes, they're teaching it, but it tends to be very thinly covered, so they may on average talk about it for a week, they may mention renewable energy and so forth. Oftentimes they don't mention the greenhouse effect, they don't really get into a lot of the nuts and bolts of the causes and effects of climate change, and most concerning of all is that many of them teach climate change as controversy, and so that's been an ongoing concern, and we now have clear evidence that that is happening. As someone who's been in science education for a long time, what is a good science education program? The key things are to keep it local, at least initially, because especially young learners need to relate to the context that they're in and to their everyday lives. It's got to have a human dimension to it. Oftentimes we teach science as very dry and technical, especially in the case of climate change, it's got to be hopeful, you need to bring in ways that it's not all gloom and doom, especially if you're talking about climate and all the range of catastrophes already happening, let alone what's projected to potentially happen. Young people need to know what can I do to make a difference, so what are the skills I need, what are the career paths I can possibly follow, I think that's what a lot of young people are really hungry for. Once they learn about climate change, they want to know, okay, I get it, what can I do about it? Ultimately that requires that the educators customize for the needs of the learner. Every learner, every community is going to have a different set of dynamics, different needs. To me, I think schools have the potential for becoming true living laboratories that not only prepare young people, but transform communities. I live in Hungary now, and the EU has put a lot of money into putting solar panels on the roofs of schools, but there's very little curriculum that ties this cool technology to what the students are learning, and so that's a huge missed opportunity. Schools are a potential leverage point for helping to inspire and really engage young people. Do you have a story of a favorite teacher or a favorite example of a curriculum that you could share? I'm a big fan of the Alliance for Climate Education, which is based in Oakland, California, but they do work all over the country, and they have mainly focused on just doing one hour-long high school assemblies, and they've done some evaluation that show that they do make a difference, that students walk away from those assemblies that are really interactive and really engaging, edutainment, if you will. It shows that students really do learn from that, and it sticks, but the next challenge is for the students to take that information and start to have conversations with their peers, with their parents, and so forth, and that's often challenging. In terms of my own evolution, I am keenly interested in what's happening internationally. I've been involved with climate education in the United States for 15 years or thereabouts, and I've had a little bit of involvement at the international level, but this opportunity that COP 21 presents, I think, is opening some new opportunities, also some new challenges. As you may know, the Framework Convention on Climate Change has some requirements for education, training, public engagement, and so forth. It's part of what they call Article 6 of the Convention. What we have seen is that most countries have ignored that by and large, and in fact, this summer, I think there was a little bit of frustration that nobody knew what Article 6 of the Convention meant, and so the Secretary has rebranded that as action for climate empowerment or ACE, and so there's going to be a whole day focused on climate education here on Friday at COP 21. Personally, I'm doing some consulting work, doing some evaluation of a FAO project that focuses on climate smart agriculture, and there's a very strong kind of education and community building component to that. This is a great opportunity for me to just see who's doing what, and there's some very impressive work going on at different scales. Pakistan actually has some really remarkable climate education work going on, especially in their universities. They've got some enormous challenges around risk reduction, around flooding, and so forth, and so they're trying to bring in young researchers to help communicate about that. Indonesia is doing some great work, but there's not enough being done to help network these various efforts that are going on here and there around the world. Do you think COP 21 is a successful networking platform for these groups? If it weren't for COP, if it wasn't for this Council of Parties, then we wouldn't be able to have these conversations, and last year we saw you at AGU, and AGU for many years served for a lot of us as the go-to place once a year where you could meet colleagues from around the world and reconnect, share some of the work that we're doing, share some of our findings, brainstorm a bit about where do we go from here, the Climate Literacy Network really got its start at some of these AGU meetings. These type of big conferences I think are incredibly valuable just to allow people to cross-pollinate and connect with each other. One of the benefits of an event like COP is that it's starting to really infuse it into everyday conversations. Certainly here in France it's all over the media, no matter what you turn on the television or you read the newspaper it's all about what's happening here. Another one of the side benefits of an event like this is that regardless of what happens with the negotiations and regardless of whether people follow through on what they commit to, maybe as important are the conversations that get sparked from this. You were telling us about the sort of things you've noticed in Hungary, how it's different lifestyle and how it's maybe a much more sustainable lifestyle that you just see on the day to day there. There's a lot of kind of knowledge about sustainability, survivability that we can learn from that part of the world. My wife is French and we had considered moving to France but the cost of living in Hungary is probably half or less than what it is in Western Europe and maybe very closely related to that is the fact that people's carbon footprint is half in Hungary of what it is in Western Europe and Europeans in general have half the footprint of what an average American has or average Australian. There's also a lot of knowledge about survivability. The 20th century was very hard on Central Europe and they survived the First World War and the Second World War and then the Soviets. What we've seen in the village that we're at is that the people say that they're poor and by any standards they don't have a lot of income coming in and they work two jobs but they cultivate every square inch of their property, they know when to plant, they know how to live in a very simple frugal way. If someone just comes up to you and says how can I solve climate change, what would you tell them? It was an individual. How can I help solve climate change? This is a trick question, right? We all have to find what we're passionate about, we have to pick our battles. On a daily basis there's a lot that we can do to educate ourselves, to communicate effectively with others. I've developed this framework that I call the ecosystem framework. Eco meaning education, communication and outreach. And I think of it as kind of a continuum, a little like outreach would be short-term weather events, very quick and communication is longer term and that could be a television program or an article or something like that. But none of those are substitute or replacement for education which does require much more pedagogical expertise or planning about what are we trying to learn. Oftentimes I think with outreach and sometimes with communication it's very kind of ad hoc and we're just trying to do things on the fly. And that works up to a certain point but when it comes to really educating ourselves, to have the basic knowledge, to understand what's happening and to know what the responses are, to know what the risks are and how we can reduce those risks, only education really gives us the tools to do that. So having kind of an integrated approach where we realize that these are differentiated and they take different skills, somebody who's a great social media czar or an expert wizard may not have any interest in education, maybe a teacher isn't able to use social media very effectively, but when we recognize that these are different tools then I think we can be much more methodical and effective in a way scientific about how we build capacity, how we build knowledge, how we build resilience in ourselves and in society.