PSL voices | My first Climate Fresk workshop

Published on April 16, 2024

September 2021: Charlotte begins her PSL journey. A first week full of various events, most notably a Climate Fresk workshop, with all of the first-year students in her Bachelor’s program. An opportunity to gain perspective on sustainability issues, by and for PSL students.

“The first days of a new academic program often come with a multitude of feelings. You discover new places, new classes, new ways of doing things, and meet new people. It’s often very exciting, but it can be a little scary too, especially when you’re also discovering a new city, which was my case when I started ��̳’s “Sustainability Sciences” Bachelor’s program in September 2021.

Luckily, two things helped me sail my first days at PSL. First of all, the cohort size – 30 students – made it easy for everyone to get to know each other quickly and helped create a good atmosphere. And second, I had the chance to take part in a with the rest of my cohort, led by my second-year classmates. The workshop took place in September, on a sunny Saturday morning, in the gardens of , where some of our classes are held.

For those of you who’ve never heard of it, the is a collaborative, educational workshop that uses collective intelligence to help people understand the causes, effects, and consequences of climate change. So it was perfectly aligned with the theme of my Bachelor’s degree, a multidisciplinary program focusing on sustainability issues.

Working in groups of eight, we spent nearly an hour positioning forty cards representing the causes and effects of global warming on a big sheet of paper, trying to establish causal relationships. There were easier cards like “deforestation”, “fossil fuels”, “melting sea ice” and others that were a bit trickier like “radiative forcing” and “pteropods and coccolithophores” (yes, that’s a real card). Lucky for us, our second-year classmates were there to provide explanations when needed and guide us in placing the cards. Once we’d made the fresco, next came a more fun, creative stage where we decorated it and then displayed it alongside those made by the other groups.

To conclude the workshop, we spent some time thinking about our own individual actions to reduce our carbon footprint as well as collective and institutional actions that need to be taken.

At the end of the school year, we completed training to become Climate Fresk leaders ourselves, and at the start of the following school year, we led the workshop for our new first-year classmates.”