Grassroots initiatives towards climate resilience in cities are likely to embed environmental education practices with potential transformative impact among young people. Through interviews and document review, we examine two initiatives involving different non-formal educational actions in Barcelona: a civic ecology practice based on the community gardening of tree pits and an energy citizenship project with the school community. Despite their diverse nature and outcomes, these educational actions promoted by grassroots groups intend to boost young people’s critical reflection, responsibility, and agency for taking individual action towards more climate-resilient cities. However, connections between agency, empowerment and transformative learning become more challenging when translated to the collective. Limitations relate to the lack of effective engagement approaches that reinforce social connectedness and local identity, and insufficient evaluation strategies. By discussing these potentials and challenges, we shed light on the synergies concerning transformative learning between the fields of environmental education and urban community resilience.

The success of long-term sustainable management of natural resources depends on local people's support. Assessing local people's attitudes, taking into account their needs, and respecting their opinions should become a management priority. In India, in the last 20 years, community needs and aspirations in forest management were handled through Joint Forest Management with varying degrees of success. Recently, the Forest Rights Act (2006) was passed to recognize and vest forest rights in forest dwelling communities. This major policy development is still in implementation, but little is known about how this devolution process will affect people's attitudes toward forests. In this paper, we analyze associations between attitudes toward state controlled forests (Reserved Forests) and (i) awareness about the Forest Right Act, (ii) attitudes toward the State Forest Department, and (iii) participation in forest management groups of mostly tribal forest dwellers in the district of Kodagu (Karnataka). We collected information with a structured questionnaire among 247 villagers living under three different land tenure and management regimes: (1) private coffee plantations, (2) Reserved Forest, and (3) National Park. The results of the multivariate analyses show that people are more likely to appreciate Reserved Forests if they have more knowledge about the Forest Rights Act and if they have positive attitudes toward the State Forest Department. A sobering result in our sample is that participation in formal forest management groups is negatively associated to attitudes toward Reserved Forests, suggesting the Joint Forest Management model doesn't necessarily help the transition from coercion to consent. Increasing local people awareness about their rights and improving their relations with the formal forest stewards remain priorities for sustainable forest management to emerge in India

Grau-Satorras, M., I. Otero, E. Gómez-Baggethun, and V. Reyes-García. 2016. Long-term community responses to droughts in the early modern period: the case study of Terrassa, Spain. Ecology and Society 21(2):33.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08232-210233

Climate change, being a product of industrialisation, can easily fuel the idea that adaptation to climate impacts is something new. Scholars of the past, however, show that societies have dynamically and heterogeneously coped with climate variability and with recurrent and abrupt weather extremes. This research aims to explore climate adaptation in preindustrial societies taking into account different levels of social organisation. We argue that this multilevel perspective can enrich our understanding of the different strategies to cope with climate impacts in past societies. Archival research was carried out in the early modern villages of Terrassa and Sant Pere (Barcelona, Spain) to reconstruct the set of strategies to cope with recurrent droughts both at community and household levels. We found that peasant families developed a wider range of strategies than communities, but that many strategies used by households and communities overlapped, potentially generating a redundancy effect and fostering complex strategies operating through cross-level interactions. By studying past adaptation strategies with common taxonomies and detailed methodologies, our paper aims to improve interdisciplinary communication with research about the human dimensions of anthropogenic climate change.