Who are we?
The National Society of Conservationists – Friends of the Earth Hungary (NSC-FoE HU) is a community of over 100 Hungarian environmental and nature protection organizations, the main goal of which is to protect nature as a whole and to promote sustainable development. The members of the Society, founded in 1989, are present in all counties of Hungary and fight for the protection of our natural values and the prevention of environmental pressures. NSC-FoE HU is a member of different European and international networks, such as Friends of the Earth, CEE Bankwatch, CEEweb for Biodiversity, CAN Europe, Eurodad, European Environmental Bureau and IUCN.
NSC-FoE HU is a radical organization in its principles: we want to draw the attention of decision-makers and citizens to the causes of environmental problems through community actions, authentic professional events, well-founded studies and publications, and targeted lobbying. We do not believe in technical or superficial political solutions but feel the need for a radical transformation of our thinking, morals and at the same time, our system of production and consumption. For us, nature is the big whole of the environment around us, the source from which we humans feed, take the goods necessary for our lives, and of which we are a part of, not to rule over it, but to sustainably benefit from it for a thousand threads.
Our work
NSC-FoE HU has a long history of work advocating for nature and implementing projects. Most recently, we worked on puting together, for the Central Bank of Hungary, a set of recommendations for a green recovery in loine with the strong and growing public demand of new ways that can lead for an economic recovery in Hungary. Alongside this, we have also been working on advocating on this matter through through the petition "A life-affirming society and economy!," already signed by over 100 stakeholder from the Hungarian society – mayors, professors and academicians, bishops, teachers, activists, artists, civil society representatives, etc. Thus, we strongly work according to strong principles:
- Decisions must be taken primarily to serve the safety and well-being of people with the aim to meet not their demands but their needs;
- Natural limits must be taken into account and resource use reduced in absolute terms, focusing on sufficiency rather than efficiency;
- Hungary's independence, self-sufficiency and the resilience of local levels must be strengthened; and
- The responsible and ethical behaviour of social and economic actors, stronger cooperation between them and the democratization of the economy must be promoted.
Game On!
NSC-FoE-Hungary will lead the work to develop educational materials with interactive content — creative exercises with a view to activate young children and their families for lifestyle changes. The learning packages will be distributed to educators. We will also compile educational material contents for secondary school students, with exercises, programme ideas and methodologies to be developed in line with them. For university students, we will create background materials to make them able to organize youth actions or sample mentoring programmes. We will organise as well teacher and educator workshops and encourage them to organise actions/campaigns in their school/group.
As the project partner representing Hungary, we will target the country's youth, recruiting Hungary's Youth Ambassadors, while also working on the development of a museum exhibition to show the links between the exhibited artefacts and climate change. We will also implement in Hungary local questing trails through the GeoQuest challenge, and work alongside improvisation theaters to input climate change related messages as part of an artistic approach to awareness raising.
Finally, we will both organise wilderness camps for children and youth — with a thematic focus on climate change and its links to ecosystem decline — and organise lobby meetings to address Hungarian decision makers on the needs to take action to tackle climate change.
