Presentation of Mr Thomas EGLI, 22 April 2019 at New-York HeadQuarters of the United Nations at occasion of the Conference on Rights of Nature.

If you have to solve very urgent questions, like emergency because of climate change or rights of nature, you cannot have to continue to manage every year same problems, only because the new generation of adults how emerge every year keep same inadequate behaviors. Of course you have to solve the problems, but you need in same time a good education provided to coming generations. Education is really a very important issue at same level that all others.

The NGO Objectif Sciences International is making what we call Participatory Research, which mean Learning Science by Doing Science through Real Projects to serve resolution of the SDGS. With this, we have a very very good effect of Education to Science, and especially for Climate and Rights of Nature.

You can see we are on all continents of the Planet. The volunteers are coming from everywhere (Russia, Canada, Europe, South-America, Asia…). If a government or a UN Program ask us, we can organize a project in absolutely all country.

We lead project for absolutely all types of publics, we do all topics of science, including human sciences, and we have a lot of partners through the world.
Our trainers are provisionally trained and are in same time scientists and facilitators.
The most important thing to understand for today is that in absolutely all our projects, science camps or animation inside schools, we find :

• Education to Rights of Nature in partnership with the UN Program Harmony with Nature
• Education to changing behaviors for Climate

These 2 learnings goals are present in the Pedagogic Project Document of all our Science Camps.

You can see here that participatory research is connected with a lot of sub-elements of the society that give us a very powerful tool to resolve some issues and to have most people involved, including partners, new places where to be active, and so one.

One first practical case is about the environmental education. The advantage to do education to nature is to change the paradigm of anthropocentric point of view. If we do education to environment, we talk about waste, pollution, noise… but we will never manage to make completely understandable what is really the system we belong to. If you consider yourself as an element of the system, your research is completely different as a scientist, and it is same effect for education. At the end of the process, your decisions are different as politic leaders. If you follow an education to nature, you can feel yourself being nature and you will think differently about problematics, you will see something else, you will become different.

This is very powerful tool for governments which wishes to solve faster their problems, as citizen can act more accurately, and cost less, if in their life they followed an Education to Nature in place of an Education to Environment.

A second very practical case is the difference between on one hand, to make education without nature (in a conventional school), and another hand, to make it happen with nature. If you place the learner in nature he will understand better mathematics or languages, geography and all other topics of the curriculum, because to be inside of nature make you become smarter, cleverer, more efficient, more open minded to learnings. If a government wants its country become or stay the first in economy, in research, in lot of topics of results, it could be smart to imagine how it could be possible to make education in nature or with nature. We know today that it can be done easily, everywhere, and that don’t have costs bigger than for conventional education.

So if you do “education by theory” you will never manage to have as good result in hard topics (like mathematics) as you will have by doing “education with nature”.

But also, when you organize education by doing real projects, you have very good effects on changing of behaviors about climate questions, or new directions in relation to nature, especially about the question of Rights of Nature, because you will involve the learners at the maximum level as possible. You create what we call community-based learning, and it is ultra-efficient in empowerment of publics in their own learnings.

And with the hard topics (as mathematics) you made understood better if it was with nature, here we find very good results also in soft topics (as leadership, innovation capacities, collaboration…).

For making projects continue and taking more and more importance, we organize several meetings to share winning practices between the operators and between the deciders, or to train the next generation of leaders. Every December the GENEVA FORUM host at United Nations Geneva the International Annual Conference on Rights of Nature in partnership with the UN Program Harmony with Nature, and in April at UNESCO in Paris we organize the Annual Conference about how Participatory Science help us to meet SDGs. The Meetings of Excellence are science camps organized in the middle of nowhere in nature (like Swiss alps) or inside towns (like in London City) and we train the teenagers to Techniques of Excellence and the Learning by Doing Project we give them to live this project-based learning week, is a question of Rights of Nature to solve.

Last but not least we cooperate with the World Federation of United Nations Associations to provide students participating at their UN Model events, in order to have a Rights of Nature room of debates into this annual training of United Nation system.