NASA Climate Days: Promoting Climate Literacy One Ambassador and One Event at a Time

With so many informal outreach and education venues across the world, leveraging them for climate education allows vast amounts of information to be translated to the public in a familiar setting through trusted local sources. One of the challenges is the development of an effective process for training informal educators and providing them with adequate support materials. The 'NASA Climate Day Kit', and its related training strategy for Earth Ambassadors, is designed to address some of these issues. The purpose of the NASA Climate Day project is to collect existing NASA climate education materials, assemble a cadre of informal educators, and provide professional development on the subject of climate change. This training is accomplished through a series of exercises, games, science talks and place-based training. After their training and immersion in climate-related content, participants develop and implement a climate event at their local informal education venue. Throughout their training the Earth Ambassadors are exposed to a wide array of climate related exercises and background content. Some of these include one-on-one science content talks with NASA scientists who study climate on a daily basis. This allows the Ambassador to have direct access to new cutting edge data and information. To complement the science talks, participants explore activities and games that can engage all ages at their climate event. During their training, they also explore the 'Climate Day Kit'. This Kit is an assemblage of climate-related materials created by various NASA groups. Key components of this Kit include data visualizations, articles, electronic reference material, science talks, NASA Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) climate materials, and examples of Climate Day events that have been conducted in the past. As an on-going resource and to use for their own climate event, each group of Earth Ambassadors has access to a dynamic website that hosts all of the science presentations from the training, along with downloadable Climate Day Kit materials. Utilizing informal educators from museums, aquariums, libraries and other similar venues allow the hard-to-understand, sometimes-controversial, topic of climate change to be presented to the public in tailored events that suit an individual community's needs. Included in the process of scheduling and executing these climate events, the Ambassadors participate in virtual conferences to discuss progress, to ensure proper evaluation and to allow ample time for questions from the trainers and scientists. This ensures an accurate stream of information from the scientist to the public in a fashion that can be understood and digested by the layperson, helping them to make better-informed decisions about societal issues related to global climate change. Through a series of local Climate Day events, it is hoped that the public will have the opportunity to have first hand experience with the topic of climate change, leaving with a better understanding of its scientific basis. Outcome: This paper will summarize the various methods and strategies used in the Climate Day training events. A discussion of methods that work and those that do not for informal education will help provide a better understanding of the challenges faced in educating the public on such a controversial and hard-to-understand topic.