Our names are Abbey and Alice and we are in Year 8. Our interest in the climate change campaign and how school life is affected by it started when we were asked to come and see Mrs W.W (our Headmistress) about any improvements we would like to make to the school. Our main concern was about the pollution in and around Chester. Our idea is to plant more trees and plants to absorb pollution; our main inspiration was from the Singapore Plant Walls. Find out more here.
Gretta Thunberg (teenage climate activist) also really inspired us; pollution in our atmosphere is having devastating effects on our environment and our wildlife. If we don’t work together, there are likely to be fatal effects to our planet and this is where we come in, to try and put back all we have unintentionally done. If everybody does something, big or small, then we might be able to reverse the amount of carbon in our air, and have a chance to improve the air quality. A survey was taken detailing whereabouts in Chester the most amount of pollution was released. The results showed us, that Nicholas street was the worst affected, which is very close to our school. Planting more trees and plants around our school will help tremendously and it is just the start; we plan to make the whole of Chester a greener and healthier place to live and we are starting our endeavour by adding a plant wall to our Stanley place block.
We knew that to achieve it would require a lot of complex architecture and maintenance so Mrs W.W and Mrs Potter sent us to look at the proposed picture house and the multi-storey carpark at the Northgate development. We learnt many useful things such as how to maintain the wall and the wildlife it will attract, as well as the fact that planning permission is required.
Our next idea, to give ourselves some more inspiration, was to look at some people who are already taking action in relation to the climate crisis; we both had the thought of reaching out to Steve Hughes for some advice.
Steve Hughes is a climate activist that has currently been directing and raising money for the Chester Super Trees, a project of huge scale and maintenance, to combat the carbon emissions in Chester. He has done many talks in and around the area, including a live TED Talk at Chester University, focusing on how we can do much more with super trees instead of normal trees and plants. Find out more here.
After getting in contact, we organised for Steve to come into school and have a tour with us. He gave us a lot of useful feedback about how we can make our school more environmentally friendly, which we are going to try and do. He also gave a presentation to our Eco Council, who are currently working on redesigning the bottom garden, and we learnt about the Australian fires, carbon emissions and many other interesting facts.
Having researched the air quality in Chester further, we have learnt that in order to try to rectify the high emissions in Chester, the council have introduced a low emission strategy. They now have a number of automatic monitoring stations around the city which assist them with collecting data. One of the priorities for the council to combat the poor air quality is set out in their anti-idling campaign. The school has also written to parents to ask them to turn off their engines when waiting to collect their children. The council is enforcing the anti-idling by penalty notices and fines. We believe one of our initiatives, as a school, should also be to enforce anti-idling outside the school.
In the future, we aspire to reach out to more people and employees in places such as Chester Zoo and other places where emissions are high due to a large volume of traffic. We are also planning to revisit the Northgate Project to enhance our motivation and knowledge.
Currently our plan is to:
- Reach out to further contacts searching for advice
- Start to look at displays in classrooms, corridors and a communal area in the school where we can explore the use of potted plants and greenery without it being intrusive.
- Find some sponsorship or do an appeal to get the resources we need for the project.
- Ensure the school has a green and clean environment.
If you are in a position to support us through sponsorship or donating pots and plants please email news@thequeensschool.co.uk
Abbey and Alice