The Climate Fresco: A Workshop To Raise Awareness About Climate Change.
The Climate Fresco is an awareness workshop on the challenges of climate change that is increasingly used by major groups such as Suez, EDF, Bouygues, Orange, and Saint-Gobain. We invite you to discover what this playful and educational tool consists of, which allows for mobilizing employees on the subject of climate.
What is the Climate Mural?
The Climate Fresco is a workshop aimed at raising awareness among as many people as possible about the challenges of climate change.
This scientific and playful workshop takes the form of a serious game composed of 42 cards that participants must associate. Each of these cards represents an aspect of global warming, such as glacier melting or the combustion of fossil fuels, for example.
Participants, divided into teams of 4 to 8 people, must together build a fresco summarizing the mechanisms of climate change as explained in the reports of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
Who is behind the Fresque du climat?
The creator of this game is the engineer Cédric Ringenbach, who is also the president of the Fresque du climat association (see link below).
In 2015, he started developing this educational workshop to help as many people as possible understand how the climate works, especially the causes and consequences of climate change.
In 2018, after three years of reflection on this fresco, he founded the eponymous association to distribute this game and train facilitators. Today, the association relies on a network of 55,000 volunteer facilitators.
How to organize a Climatic Fresco?
In practice, this workshop lasts for 3 hours and is organized in 3 phases.
The first phase of the game consists of collectively building the mural connecting the 42 cards according to the cause-and-effect relationships described by the IPCC in its various reports.
During the second phase, participants are free to unleash their creativity to decorate the mural and give it a title.
The final phase is a debriefing where each participant can express their feelings and discuss individual and collective solutions to implement in order to fight against climate change.
What is the interest of the Fresque du climat?
According to Cédric Ringenbach, the inventor of the fresco, manipulating the cards, arguing, and drawing around the fresco gives climate change a much more concrete reality.
While IPCC reports are often too complicated and too long to be read in full, this 3-hour workshop allows for a much more playful awakening of awareness on this subject.
When organized within a company, this serious game brings about collective intelligence and often leads to the implementation of concrete actions within the company.
Indeed, even though the fresco is not perfect and does not provide solutions, participants come out motivated to take action at their own level and have a better understanding of certain environmental measures taken by their management.
Who is the Fresque du climat for?
The Climate Fresco was designed to be accessible to all audiences. It is available in two versions, for adults and for children aged 9 to 14, with a game of only 23 cards in the junior version.
Today, this tool is mainly used in an educational setting, in middle schools, high schools, or higher education, and within companies. The Suez group was the first company to partner with the association in June 2020 and offer the workshop to its 90,000 employees worldwide.
Other groups such as EDF and Saint-Gobain quickly followed suit. The management of Saint-Gobain even decided that all employees of the group should participate in this exercise. According to the group's goals, 80% of its 168,000 employees worldwide should have participated in this workshop by 2025.
What is the success of the Climate Fresco?
The Climate Mural is a team building activity increasingly used in France and abroad, in companies, administrations, and universities such as Columbia, Berkeley, or MIT! The mural has actually been translated into 49 languages and adapted in 149 countries.
Since the beginning of the 2022 school year, Elisabeth Borne's government has undertaken to train 25,000 state executives in the challenges of climate change through a pedagogical workshop inspired by this mural.
In 2023, five years after its creation, this awareness workshop has been attended by nearly 1.2 million people worldwide. Its success does not seem to be stopping anytime soon as this tool is becoming viral in companies and is of interest to other governments such as Mexico, Croatia, and some states in the United States.
