“What is the Environment and How Should it be Protected?” Panel report

The panel report has been prepared by Julie Gloannec and Sibel Akyıldız.

Within the scope of the event ‘What is the Environment and How Should it be Protected?’, Assistant Prof. Barış Gençer Baykan from the Department of Public Administration at Yeditepe University, along with his students and members of the Yeditepe University Sustainability Student Club, held a panel at IFEA on Friday, March 15, 2024.

The first part of the event, consisting of 2 stages, was designed to discuss topics such as the definition of the environment, factors leading to environmental pollution, and propose solutions collectively, aiming to raise awareness together. This first part began with the moderation of Assist. Prof. Barış Gencer Baykan and the presentation by Dr. Sibel Akyıldız.

In the presentation titled “The Emergence of the Environment as a Phenomenon,” participants were informed about what the environment is, types of environments, their classification, the process of transformation of the environmental phenomenon into an environmental problem, and the causes and consequences of environmental pollution as the most basic environmental problem. This presentation, conducted with the interactive participation of Yeditepe University students, was an event where our habits, whether we pay attention to them or overlook them in daily life, were questioned and discussed.

The second part of the event continued with the practice of what we learned in the first part through a workshop called ‘Climate Fresk,’ led by Julie Gloannec, a doctoral student from Tours University and Climate Fresk facilitator.

Climate Fresk is a collaborative serious-game that aims to raise public awareness about climate change. It was developed by French engineer Cédric Ringenbach and launched in 2018, as a non-profit NGO. It has been offered to 1.5 million participants in 157 countries since then.

Following a short presentation of the workshop, students have first been divided into three groups of five or six. A task they were given was to arrange cards in accordance with the causes and effects of human-caused climate change. Their teachers and facilitator helped them brainstorm for over an hour, until they were able to design their own « fresk » and to give it a title.

Taking into consideration the striking nature of the Climate Fresk, time was designated to the students’ expression of emotions they may have felt while learning about climate change, its effects on the environment, and its implications for human beings.

Climate crisis solutions and action proposals are not included in the serious-game: it is up to the participants to brainstorm together and develop possible collective and individual actions, which can be applied to the 4 main sectors of human activity – industry, agriculture, building use, and transportation – in order to reduce their negative environmental impact. Various ideas were shared, forming a collaborative “action board”: reducing meat consumption, encouraging recycling in Turkey, commuting less by car, etc.

After this motivational note, we concluded the workshop by encouraging participants to choose one action taken from the board to implement in their daily lives.

In their final comments on the event, students expressed their satisfaction with the fact that they had been able to gain a better apprehension of complex concepts such as climate change and the various types of environments through collective brainstorming and discussion.

The knowledge acquired over the course of the workshop has also allowed them to better understand some phenomena and events that have occurred in Turkey over the past few years that they’ve heard about (mining catastrophes, forest fires, mucilage, etc.) As a whole, the discussed elements encouraged some of the participants to think about changing their daily habits in order to reduce human impact on the climate and our environment.

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