On 7 April 2026, Collège Matteo Ricci — a Belgian school that joined the IMPACT Erasmus+ project to support its dissemination among educational institutions — organised a full-day pedagogical workshop dedicated to the links between climate change and migration. The event, facilitated by Bernd Van Den Heuvel, Aurore Berdal, and Emilie Van de Velde, brought together students and educators for an engaging and thought-provoking learning experience built around the project’s toolkit.
The day was structured around three interactive sessions. The morning opened with an introduction to climate science, followed by two hands-on activities drawn directly from the IMPACT toolkit. The first, Dixit Émotions, invited participants to explore personal and emotional responses to images related to migration and displacement. The second, the Jeu des Chaises (Chair Game) — adapted from a Caritas Belgium activity — asked participants to physically represent the unequal distribution of the world’s wealth, and then to embody the journeys of refugees seeking safety. The exercise generated a powerful moment of collective reflection: participants discovered, for instance, that the majority of the world’s refugees are hosted not in wealthy nations, but in low- and middle-income countries — with Turkey alone sheltering more refugees than all 27 EU member states combined.
The afternoon session deepened the climate science component, guiding participants through greenhouse gas mechanisms, the sources of anthropogenic emissions, the Paris Agreement targets, and the specific vulnerabilities of the Horn of Africa — a region at the intersection of climate stress, food insecurity, and forced displacement. A Migration Journey activity and a role-play exercise rounded out the day, inviting participants to step into the perspective of those whose lives are shaped by these global challenges.
The workshop concluded with an Exit Ticket — a set of reflective questions asking participants to articulate what they had learnt and connect the scientific and human dimensions of the topic.
The IMPACT project — Increasing Migration and Climate Change Public Awareness through Collaboration and Teaching — is a KA220-SCH Erasmus+ cooperation partnership co-funded by the European Union, coordinated by ECEPAA. We are grateful to Collegio Matteo Ricci and its dedicated team for bringing the IMPACT toolkit to life with such commitment and creativity.
