Reflective Journal

This week you completed the climate change challenge. You will have participated in the Climate Change Challenge Sharing Day (Week) and discussed what you learned during the climate change challenge. Now I want you to reflect on your journey and what you learned. Consider these questions to help you write this entry:

What was the most important thing you learned during the climate change challenge about yourself and about the world you live in?
What was the best thing about the climate change challenge?
What was the worst thing about the climate change challenge?
Will you keep trying to reduce your carbon footprint going forward?

The challenge was to spend the last two weeks reducing my carbon footprint and what I did was to use public transportation rather than using my car. Others became vegan for two weeks, bought bulk orders of groceries to reduce the amount of packaging, used their bike rather than their car to go to work, etc. Ill attach a description of what I did in my challenge.

To reitterate what the climate change challenge was:

Over reading week I asked you to do some homework. I asked you to read articles from Nature (https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-019-02711-4/index.html and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0411-2 and from the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/guides/year-of-living-better/how-to-reduce-your-carbon-footprint). The first two articles provide background for the CCC and the second provides information you can use to determine what behaviour(s) you will target to reduce your footprint. You might also want to try the quiz recently posted on the New York Times to help decide what to do https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/30/climate/climate-footprint-quiz.html?referringSource=articleShare.

In class you calculated your carbon footprints. You can use this information to help target an activity that will have the greatest effect on reducing your carbon footprint. I would recommend targeting one aspect of your life (diet, transportation, home energy, electronics, fashion, etc.) and pick something that can be put into action for a two week period. For example, you could try being a vegetarian for two weeks, or you could switch from driving your car to school to taking the bus. Be as creative as you can to think about ways that you can make a difference, but be realistic and safe about your choice.

The challenge was