Review by Adriaan Lucassen (5 EC)

The next educational project I’ll look at is the Nairobi Summer School on Climate Justice (NSSCJ). Although the concept of a University Summer School is of course nothing new, there aren’t a lot of summer schools that solely focus on climate themes, especially in Africa. The NSSCJ attempts to fill this gap, organising seminars on climate justice for two weeks long. It was first organised, at Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya, in the summer of 2021 and it was held again in 2022, planning to make it an annual event. Themes discussed include deeper geographies of climate change; the relation of climate change to science, social change and government policy; and the balance between global development and the health of the planet. The summer school is partly funded by the university, the United Nations, and the Dutch and Swedish governments.

This project is a nice way of bringing together students who are already passionate about the environment. They are probably well-educated already, but I would figure that the students attending here would not be the people who end up in the high-end “polluting jobs”. It will teach them a lot of new things and will also give them new contacts throughout the continent and beyond to share this passion with.

There are also obvious flaws with this, looking at it as an educational project. Although there are a few scholarships available, most participants have to pay for entering the summer school, and will then also have to pay for their travel to Nairobi. This, combined with the fact that it is aimed at students already, means that it is quite elitist in nature. This seems a bit ironic, given the fact that climate justice is about everyone – especially the poor people in small communities that get exploited by big companies, which at least for me is the first thing I think of with the term. There is probably no real way around this, but it does mean it just is not for everyone. Apart from that, there is also the irony with these kinds of things that most people, coming to learn about climate problems, travel there by air, which is the most polluting way of travel.

source:
https://climate-justice.school/