Tag: sustainable palm oil
We’ve launched two brand new games to engage even more people with our Sustainable Palm Oil campaign!
The climate crisis our planet is facing is of great concern for many young people. The education sector has an opportunity to play a vital role in the legacy of COP26.
As the World Biodiversity Summit sparks discussion on the latest ideas and plans to tackle biodiversity loss, Chester Zoo Science Director, Simon Dowell, writes about the path forward for us in tackling one particular area of biodiversity decline…
A NEW BBC wildlife series, narrated by Sir David Attenborough and Prince William features our work promoting sustainable palm oil.
Ferrero UK helping us to create a sustainable future, one city at a time.
Our education programmes are an important part of our mission of preventing extinction. They inspire people to care about and, more importantly, take action for the natural world. We deliver a lot of our education activities with people when they visit the zoo, but we know not everyone is able to come to us.
To achieve our conservation mission, it’s important that we reach as many people as possible. So, in 2009, we took the zoo on the road and launched our free Safari Ranger outreach service, taking zoo education workshops out to schools and community groups in our local area.
We started with one Safari Ranger and a handful of workshops for primary school aged children. Over the last decade, our offer and team has grown hugely. We now work across the North West of England and into North Wales. In 2019, we delivered a huge 2,500 workshops engaging almost 80,000 participants ranging from early years groups through to university aged students, and everything in between.
Whilst Safari Ranger workshops can be booked by any school within a 60 minute drive of the zoo, we have particularly focused our projects on those schools who might face additional barriers to visiting. We aim to work with schools who have had limited previous engagement with the zoo and who have high numbers of pupils eligible for free school meals. Projects are linked to one of our main conservation campaigns and aim to empower pupils to act for wildlife, as well as generating learning across the curriculum.
Since the pilot phase, 100s of schools have been involved in taking action for our Sing for Songbirds campaign, our Sustainable Palm Oil Challenge and more recently our Wildlife Connections campaign which focuses on the threats facing UK Wildlife. Each project involves multiple visits from our team to the school and a trip to the zoo. In some cases, families from those schools are also supported to visit the zoo with free tickets and resources linked to their children’s learning.
We’ve been celebrating as Oxford and Newquay have committed to become Sustainable Palm Oil Cities and towns – following a model developed for the city of Chester by wildlife conservationists here at the zoo.
Since 2017 we’ve been working with Ignite TSA to inspire schools to put conservation at the heart of their curriculum, empowering pupils and teachers to act for wildlife.