Grant: Catalyst Grant: CBR in Climate Change Priority Area - Climate Justice

The impacts of climate change disproportionately affect children, who are more physically vulnerable than adults to the effects of environmental degradation and will bear the consequences throughout their lives. Recognizing the crucial role children play in addressing the climate crisis, national and international bodies urge cultivating their love of nature and deepening their environmental understanding. To empower children as agents of change, fostering a strong connection with their natural world through outdoor play is pivotal. Further, outdoor play is fundamental to children's healthy development and wellbeing, and helps mitigate their climate-change related anxiety. Regrettably, children's opportunities for outdoor play have reduced drastically in recent generations, with children from high-density and lower-income neighbourhoods experiencing the greatest challenges to accessing these opportunities. Our team has developed interventions called Outdoor Play and Learning (OPAL), which integrate outdoor play and its inherent learning aspects into educational settings like child care centres and schools. Since children spend most of their waking hours in these environments, incorporating OPAL in schools creates novel opportunities to promote climate justice by ensuring equitable access to natural environments and enhancing environmental literacy. In partnership with the Richmond School District and other key collaborators, we will: 1) build and deepen our collaboration and partnerships; 2) analyze the factors that influence OPAL opportunities in Richmond elementary schools; 3) co-design an intervention that will address these factors; and, 4) co-develop a funding proposal to implement the intervention and evaluate it in Richmond elementary schools. We aim to make OPAL a regular part of elementary schools, addressing inequities in access to natural environments while fostering environmental literacy to empower the next generation to champion climate justice.