Johnny Ibuna (Y10)

Grantham Institute on Climate Change

We were kindly visited by a few members of the Geography department at Imperial College London for a talk on managing climate change, a topic that we had recently discussed in our lessons. We listened to doctorate-level scholars about how climate change comes to happen, the consequences of climate change, how we can adapt to the consequences (making changes to our behaviours with climate change having already happened), and how we can mitigate the consequences (reducing the impacts of the consequences), before being given the opportunity to put what we had learnt into practice by discussing in small groups.

The Grantham Institute sits within Imperial College London, who aim to contribute to, and lead on, world-class research, training and innovation towards effective action on climate change and the environment.

The mini-presentations by each of the scholars talked about issues such as slope stabilisation for places where heavy rainfall had made areas unstable, and the use of ice cores to evaluate the change in CO2 in the atmosphere. These ice cores had been collected by the British Antarctic Survey, who are stationed at the Halley VI research station located on the Brunt Ice Shelf, where the typical winter temperatures are below -20°C with extreme lows of around -55°C, and there is 24-hour darkness for 105 days per year.

Personally, I found this experience to be very thought-provoking and enriching as it went into things that we’d already discussed in previous Geography lessons in even greater depth, giving us the opportunity to view this familiar topic from a different, more advanced perspective and allowing us to see the topic of climate change from an even more advanced lens. Not only was it useful for academics (lessons, exams, and so on) - it was also just knowledge that was useful to me as an individual in general; with climate change becoming an increasingly large problem in the world, especially for our generation, I feel that it is important to learn about climate change and its effects so that we know how to tackle - both in the future, and in the present.

As a school, we have also been working with UCL's new Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education. Two of our teachers, Ms J Carrier (Vice Principal for Teaching and Learning), and Ms D Patel (Director of Learning for Humanities) are part of their promotional video.