In the beginning ofMarch a new Climate Compliance Team started and here is one of their first movies, put together by Simon. Enjoy!

Richmond Vale Academy is "Another Kind of School" where adults gather to become enlightened and inspired, gain knowledge and become ready for action. Our school operate as a base for personal enlightenment, for general and specific knowledge such as organic farming, global warming, climate change and as inspiration to take action and march into the Open Future. Participants join for 1, 6 or 18 months and all are involved with The St. Vincent Climate Compliance Conference 2012 - 2021. The Idea of The 10 year standing action conference is that teachers, students and the people of St. Vincent make our island more Climate Compliant. Climate Compliant means to be ready for climate change and become food, water and energy secure. Now this certainly is a challenge! With the first team in 2012, we started studying about global warming and climate change and realized the size of one of the big issues the world has ever faced. Programs in Another Kind of School combine studies, research and actions in different periods and Three hundred students from fifty different countries already joined the program. By now thousands of trees have been planted, tons of trash removed from beaches and streets, biogas introduced in family homes and right now we're in the middle of setting up 200 sustainable home gardens. By the end of 2018 the first 30 home...

RVA Climate Compliance: 1 month programme evaluation Expectations: From attending the 1 month Climate Compliance programme at RVA I hoped to learn about Permaculture in relation to sustainable farming. I wanted to see how it works in practice, getting to grips with the day to day management of the farm and gardens, whilst picking up new ideas and developing skills. I also hoped to live a healthier lifestyle and perhaps even get myself fit. Courses & Studies Morning classes I found some of the one hour morning classes to be very useful sources of information and learning. Highlights were those on Agroforestery, Soil Structure and Solar Panels. Documentaries – documentary evenings provided opportunity to watch material selected from the wider RVA community within a focused environment. It was good to discuss the subjects afterwards, and take on board diverse insights and opinions. Effects of Climate Change Tour – perhaps the most poignant element of the course was this tour of places and people suffering recent extremities of weather. People were forthcoming with their views once they got going highlighting education and sustainable living as improvements to be made. Climate Compliance practical actions  Solar Dryer We constructed a solar dryer which we presented this to the RVA community and to the wider community on the RVA open day for which we made flyers alongside a variety of...

Climate change and global warming are hot topics these days. Studies conducted by various scientists suggest that climate change is happening and it could have devastating and damaging effects on human life. So, what is climate change? Climate change is a change in the usual weather found in a place. This could be a change in how much rain a place usually gets in a year. Or it could be a change in a place's usual temperature for a month or season. Climate change is also a change in Earth's climate. This could be a change in Earth's usual temperature. Or it could be a change in where rain and snow usually fall on Earth. Weather can change in just a few hours and climate takes hundreds or even millions of years to change. Climate Change facts Climate change facts show clearly that we need to act. Change is happening; the Paris Agreement set the ball in motion – though has been criticised for not going far enough –; and as well as nations including Portugal, Denmark, Costa Rica and Scotland producing huge amounts of energy from the sun and wind; Sweden is soon set to become the first fossil fuel-free country in the world; largely due to public demand in the past few years. The effects of climate change has already started occurring in the...

Climate change is a phenomenon that continues increasing the heat of a world level. The NASA scientists informs  that July was the hottest month of 2016. According to data released by NASA, July was also the hottest month on record for the world the streak means that 2016 is still well on its way to upsetting last year as the hottest year on record. [caption id="attachment_6146" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Photo credit: NASA According to NASA, the heat is rising streak since October 2015, which was the first month in your dataset hotter than normal. July 2016 was hotter than the 1951-1980 average it wasAccording to NASA, the heat is rising streak since October 2015, which was the first month in your dataset Hotter than normal.above July 2015, the next warmest July in records that go back to 1880. The record July heat also means this was the hottest month the planet has seen over the course of NASA's records. That's because July is also generally the hottest month of the year due the fact that it's summer in the northern hemisphere where there's more land. [caption id="attachment_6141" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Photo credit: NASA Earth’s temperature spiral toward 2°C flirting with the 1.5°C threshold 2015 set frenzy of climate records. Will be the last record hot month most important of this year as the residual heat from an exceptionally...

Exxon knew about climate change Exxon replaced the Esso, Enco and Humble oil companies in 1973, but its history goes back to 1859, where Standard Oil of New Jersey was founded. Exxon and later ExxonMobil has since grown to become the largest and most powerful oil company in the world, with a value of 360 billion USD, nearly 20 times that of Mozambique’s GDP. Exxon knew everything about climate change, and denied it. The Los Angeles Times, in cooperation with the Columbia University School of Journalism and a prize-winning website called Inside Climate News, have after months of thorough investigations reported that as early as 1979, top scientists at Exxon predicted quite accurately how carbon dioxide was accumulating in the atmosphere, and that the main culprit was the products sold by Exxon and the other big oil companies. Exxon scientists continued their research, and through the 1980s they developed climate models that all showed how the burning of fossil fuels influenced our climate by raising the temperature, which would cause serious climate change. It is now clear that the predictions made by Exxon scientists 40 years ago were very accurate compared to the actual rise in global temperatures since then. In the mid-1980s, these scientists laid out their predictions before top executives at Exxon; that temperatures on Earth would rise by up to 6 degrees Celsius...

Taking action against climate change Where many governments have been slow to act against climate change, cities and localities where the community has more direct influence on politicians have started to act to limit greenhouse gasses. In July 2015, Pope Francis gathered mayors from big cities around the world, who discussed how they could make cities sustainable such as planting trees, providing public transportation, making room for bicycles, installing solar panels etc. Because local communities for some time have acted on their own, this has started to push national governments towards more action. We see a change where cities and local communities are taking action for climate change. Financial capitalists begin to see the writing on the wall The pressure to move away from fossil fuels is finally having an effect on the financial capitalists, who are the major force behind the capitalist system. The governor of the Bank of England that issues the British currency warned investors in September 2015. He simply said that the vast reserves of fossil fuels could never be burnt and thus investors will end up owning useless oil or coal reserves and making huge financial losses. Goldman Sachs, the leading investment bank in the USA and the ultimate insider whose chief executives go on to become leaders of government agencies and central banks in North America and Europe, announced in...

[caption id="attachment_4178" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Infrastructural damage in the St. Vincent and the Grenadines town of Georgetown, following the Christmas Eve 2013 storm. Photo Credit: trust.org In a lot of developed countries, and especially those in temperate climates, it is easy to think of climate change as something that is going to happen. A threat that will influence the lives of our children or grandchildren. However, in a lot of places people are already experiencing a lot of the negative effects of global warming . Particularly developing countries around the equator are seeing the impact and if you happen to live in a small island state you are facing an even higher risk. St. Vincent & the Grenadines , unfortunately, fits perfectly into all these categories. At  Richmon d Vale Academy we went out into the local communities to observe and talk to people about their experience with living in a place that is changing rapidly. Not all of the people we met were familiar with the concepts of Global Warming or Climate Change  but everyone could tell that their country was acting differently than it used to.       The consequences of Global Warming and Climate Change in St. Vincent and the Grenadines Rising sea levels. As glaciers and icecaps are melting the sea level is rising. A group of older Vincentians we met told us...